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[Craig Stern]

Suggestion: lower the contrast on your background image. It's way too hard to pick out the essential elements of the GUI against the background right now.

[marcuz]

I'm waiting for the last update by Florian to take in serious accoount an early rebalance of the GUI contrast, taking in account that you guys have the same feeling about it; on one hand the skin has its own reason of being that way, and that in full screen it seems to me not disturbing, but on the other hand I value your input about it being invading one's attention.
Whatever I will do, I really care for it to be perfect for the purpose, so I thank you guys for the suggestions.

[marcuz]

I just wanted to say that I redesigned completely the interface' skin, retaining the idea at the base of the previous one, but keeping in mind your comments, and since I like the new one much more, thank you!

I'll share a screenshot as soon as I complete the items icons.

[marcuz]

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40951.0

I've posted a call for a work for hire / collaboration here on TIG, the link above.

We have been very busy developing the game in the past months, Florian rewrote most of the engine and implemented new cool stuff, that I let him talk about, while I redid the interface, and then had to temporarily stop working on the art, except for odd bits and roughs for more wallsets, to focus on the story and dialogues and their static scenes, about 100 so far, more to come.

Writing was and is very complex, because of the branching structure of them and because they impact greatly how the player will perceive his character, depending on the choices made, not to delve into how they shape the places the player will visit in a single run of the game. It's a learning process, very fatiguing and very rewarding at the same time.

Now, hoping to mostly finishing the dialogues by the end of june, with more static scenes to go with them, I'll can plan for the rest of the graphic work, that is still very large, and I would gladly use an help in finishing the wallsets and spells and projectile animations, which require a more pixelartist's hands than mine.

If you are intereseted in check it, I thank you in advance!

[SiENcE]

The works here never stopped during the last weeks and today the one hundred and fifty-second story illustration saw color!
Meanwhile, plans are laid out for the Greenlight trailer's plot. More about it soon!

Our website is up.
http://aeonofsands.com/

We have nearly ~60% of the game done so far.

We have setup facebook, google+ and twitter to post updates for you:

• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/aeonofsands
• Google+ - https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Aeonofsands/posts
• Twitter - https://twitter.com/aeonofsands

Two new story graphics:

A outpost in the desert.


Here you see buyable weapons at the outposts - merchant shop.

[JustRadek]

Might be a little late for the feedback, but I think the arrow buttons that are meant to go in the bottom-center take a bit too much space (unless you're dealing with a touch-screen device, in which case they might be too small/clumped together). While playing dungeon-crawling CRPGs with mouse support, I always gravitated toward the keyboard for navigation and only used the mouse on the port-view/characters.

Perhaps more space could be dedicated to the minimap? It's a fair amount already, but I always appreciated a generous minimap for helping to orient myself in these kinds of games.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Really nice art assets. The contrast levels and levels of detail are all over the place -- it looks like you cobbled together your art from a bunch of different sources, or didn't give your artist enough control of the way their art was used ingame. Visually it looks very unprofessional/hacked together, which is a shame considering the quality of some of the assets.

[SiENcE]

Really nice art assets. The contrast levels and levels of detail are all over the place -- it looks like you cobbled together your art from a bunch of different sources, or didn't give your artist enough control of the way their art was used ingame. Visually it looks very unprofessional/hacked together, which is a shame considering the quality of some of the assets.

What assets do you mean?

Do you mean the screenshots or the artworks? For current screenshots please visit the first post of this thread or our webpage.

[SiENcE]

Might be a little late for the feedback, but I think the arrow buttons that are meant to go in the bottom-center take a bit too much space (unless you're dealing with a touch-screen device, in which case they might be too small/clumped together). While playing dungeon-crawling CRPGs with mouse support, I always gravitated toward the keyboard for navigation and only used the mouse on the port-view/characters.

Perhaps more space could be dedicated to the minimap? It's a fair amount already, but I always appreciated a generous minimap for helping to orient myself in these kinds of games.

This is an very old shoot and does not represent the current state. Here you can see an ingame shoot of the current game. We discussed the control part several times. It's true that we also want to deal with touch devices, as this goes best with such kind of gameplay. For mouse gameplay we didn't changed anything, because of the old-shool feeling .

Some people also complained that the gameplay area is too small. But this isn't right. It's zoomable and depends on the fullscreen resolution and aspect ratio you want to play (lcd nativ resolution). We have a pixelart game and therefore we need to scale even (2x, 4x aso.). Thats why we need a large background to not show black boarders.

I hope you understand my explanation, my english is not very good .

[SiENcE]

We're back with some insight on the inner workings of Two Bits Kid.

I will show AoS to a game developers audience this weekend at Devmania 2014 in Mainz, talking about what defines it and makes its own game.
He will show also a bits of never before seen static scenes, and finally, he will play our prototype live!

Back in Italy instead, Marco has shifted his work on the dungeon content of AoS: wallsets and opponents, since the start of September, conceivably until the end of October, to add and polish stuff that will appear in our video trailer for the game, that we asked a very talented video editor friend to help us with.

More about it and him later. For now, let me show you a couple of the concept images of AoS 

[marcuz]

Hello! I have planned a quiet noght in, what with the new year etc, and I thought to update this thread with the news of the game blog.

The first post is about the NPC development, showing my process from concept to in-game art.
It's here:
http://blog.aeonofsands.com/

As usual, I humbly ask you readers to bear with our rarified posting here, there on the blog, or if you have stumbled on our Fb and G+ pages, there too: we are only two persons and the work on AoS keeps us - me in particularly - relatively slow on the www reading and posting!

[SiENcE]

random development shots

Good news: Nearly 60% of the asset production is done so far! We are in heavy development.

So the story is finished with over 120 very complex dialoges. @marcuz has handdrawn over 170 story scenes.

The engine is near feature complete and fully playable. 6 of 20 enemies are already fighting, in 4 dungeons, against the devs.

Roots, fucking roots everywhere.

And you? What 'ave you heard?

In hot pursuit.

Writing the different endings of the game.

A world-/travelmap snippet of Aeon of Sands.

Item designing rig.

A medium sized #Twine dialogue

[marcuz]

Hello again, I thought to share a basic animation of a doorway, before I get to paint over each frame.

Since this level is an alive underground - excavated by the huge roots of the tree protecting the city where the game starts, and only partly adapted by the citizenship, as a storage area and partly occupied by the disenfranchised of the city above - I wanted some quantities that each dungeon share (levers, doors, alcoves etc) to be living roots or at least framed by roots.

In the case of the door, this proved a bit more difficult than expected as I did not plan for this since the start.
Our normal doors are in fact divided in a static doorframe and a 5 frames animation for the door, a simple sliding (usually but not always) with some perspective and lighting adjustments.

Here I had instead to treat the two parts as one, and thus make all of five frames interact with the rest of the dungeon.

In the end the only added difficulty was to keep all of the corridor background registered correctly, and to keep track of what root goes above, what underneath.

[marcuz]

As we're approaching the last part of the ambient making of the game, I want to show an automated batch in action to create the basic walls of a maze; this part in the gif takes one of of two walls of a set (each wall comes with a pair, a plus one of sort) that I had designed on a different artwork, and deploys it on the perspective grid of the world view.
It applies also a basic distance shading, different for outdoor and indoor.





As this process works well only with flat surfaces, whereas basically all walls in game have protrusions, niches, holes instead, I have then to paint over pretty much all the 8 side views of the wall, for instance here below you can see what I mean in the pillars of the treehouse and in the vegetation.





After that's done, the 12 tiles get exported in their atlas, to be further tweaked with color shader if necessary, or used directly in game.

[marcuz]

Ok, 2016 has started and we're one update closer to the release of the game.

Since last one, in december, we have started finally directing towards the fun part of the game, with SiENcE putting together the mazes, and me polishing assets, and starting to create new monsters, which will keep me busy until April, probably..

Yesterday, for instance, I spent partly on testing spells effect, of which half is complete (meaning they do affect the environment, the party or the NPCs).




Also, the last day of last year, I have finally completed the about 220 illustrations that go along the game story. Next, somewhere in Spring, I have to play through all the 100 dialogues along with them.

[Ludipe]

Wow! Loving this project :-)

I'm a big fan of dungeon master-like games, and this one looks super cool.

I've got a question, did you implement a smooth camera or is it old-school? When you go forward or turn, do you just render the next position or is there a smooth transition from the old position? And finally, why did you decide to do that?

[SiENcE]

As you can (maybe) see in the gif animation the current developer version has no smooth camera movement.

Technical explanation:
The game is purely 2D. It's made with nearly the same techniques like the old games like Eye of Beholder or Dungeon Master. We chose this over 3D in order to have pixelperfectness . But I have a "fake" camera movement in the engine. This looks a bit different than those who drive on rails. It looks more like a step forward, which in my point suits my needs.

Personal preferences:
I like my smooth step forward implementation and I'd also like to add a small turn animation, as this is really needed when someone watches you playing.

Marco doesn't like this at all, as it lowers the speed you can play the game with.

So we will see how we will decide, but I think we'll do it like Lands of Lore. We'll include an option to turn it on or off.

[Pixel Noise]

Can't believe I'm just seeing this for the first time - but wow, I really like the design/art. Reading through the thread, you guys have put a lot of thought into the UI, etc - looking forward to a playable build!

[marcuz]

Just a short post, showing the process of pretty much all exploration content creation: I design anything starting from rough shapes of fixed sizes that we figured early on, like the simple stairs here in the second frame, and then draw directly on them, while they are superimposed to the rendition of the actual point where they will be used.

Rinse and repeat for all the various positions on our grid, so basically, a stairway requires the thing you see here below x 12 times (6 upward and 6 downward)

[SiENcE]

Another small update.
This week i was building some mazes for Aeon. Beside we improved the games engine a bit.

This is how throwing stones in "Eye of the Beholder" looks like...



Now, with Aeon of Sands we tried to improve throwing things so that it feels more responsive...smoother and with a little bounce effect.



Only for this Test, i choose to use the original EoB wallset. It works out of the box, we just have to double the size of the sprites, as in Aeon we use natively the double resolution of pixelart assets. Wooh.

until later...and use the #screenshotsaturday
SiENcE