Most Important Update Things
We made another strong recruiting push and brought on some really talented developers and artists to help push our UI to where it needs to be. We haven’t had UI support for the last ten months so getting our menus, game flow and HUD progressing was very difficult. Now we are trying to get that all caught up with the rest of the game. Departmental breakdown below.
Art Update
Above is a concept piece Matt created to show the color scheme/look/mood of our new level we’re starting on, Hanako Village. This map is the first of our Village game mode maps. This mode has players defend or destroy key objectives (like the temple in the bottom left, or the thatched roofed stables on the right) to unlock more capture points to try to deplete your enemy’s morale to push forward to the next map.
3d art will begin on key pieces now through the end of March, we’ll have more screenshots as it progresses to cool spots.
Programming Update
Our programming team is working on a variety of things right now. The main thing is improving game play stability to work towards getting our Dedicated Server build ready to go. We want this so we can have a playtest server always running (for stability testing as well) and have that ready to get the game closer to distributable in some form.
On the other hand, our gameplay programmer is working on improving the overall feel of our status effects (knockdown, knockback, etc) and getting the tech started for the Ninja. The Kusarigama (sickle and chain) is a really complicated weapon, so we’re getting it ready for Grappling and it’s design set.
Other Things Going On
We just integrated FMOD into our project which will truly free our Audio Engineer to have full reign over audio programming in the game. We’re looking forward to hearing the audio improve in our game in the coming months.
As mentioned above, our UI/UX team has been hard at work getting a working multiplayer chat with all the expected features an online chat should have. They’re also going to start implementing our full game flow so future players can experience the full game from menu-to-menu on into the game and so on.
Hanako is starting to really feel like a full experience and not just a single-map prototype. We’re seeing more and more strategy in playtests, more laughing and less nitpicking in combat. We even had ridiculous underwater battles (we didn’t realize attacks worked underwater with swimming legs by chance) in our Gifu Crossroads pond.
Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks/months. As always, check us out on all the social networks
