If you would like some feedback I think you're right about making the ground less busy. Don't go too far with it because the detail looks nice, but a little less busy could help. I'd also maybe recommend trying to differentiate the color of the trees and the ground so they don't blend too much? It's looking cool though man

The past couple days I've been working on the cave entrance to the first quest you will embark on. This quest is by far the easiest as you simply have to talk to this man to become an Ambassador. You are then awarded the golden staff which gives you your powers. Please ignore the current staff the player is holding in this image. It is just a placeholder. The beginning of the game is modeled after the first Zelda down to the shape of the starting area. You will spawn with no weapon and have to talk to this man to arm yourself, just like the first Zelda. This is of course by design and is meant to pay homage to that game.

Currently I am working on a bug regarding persistent objects that should remain existent between rooms. Before I explain further I will present an image that defines the problem.

As you can see, the debris from the barrels in the outside area carry over to the inside area. If you are not familiar with GameMaker, then I will briefly describe persistent objects. In GameMaker you are allowed at most one Room (a play area) to be instantiated at a time. Because the world is very big, we have divided it up into multiple rooms. However because of this, objects such as debris, blood, etc will disappear from a room once it is unloaded. Thus when you return to a room that you laid waste to, it will be in perfect condition. This is where persistent object come into play. Persistent objects will not be unloaded from GameMaker when a room is destroyed. Note this works great for the player, camera, hud, light engine, etc. but it sucks for objects like debris where there are thousands of pieces everywhere. It's just too much for the Game Maker to handle. This is where my solution comes in:

Every room is stored in a 2d array of rooms and two global variables represent your x and y position in the array. once the player walks off the edge of the screen, these variables are updated and the room switches. Now there is a persistent object I call obj_Persistence_Engine. When Blood, debris, etc is created, it logs its sprite image, rotation, x position, y position, and world coordinates into obj_Persistence_Engine. When a room is changed all existing debris and blood is destroyed. If there are any blood or debris objects logged into obj_Persistence_Engine in the next room they are instantiated on Room start. The result is the illusion of 1000s of persistent objects being achieved with a single persistent object, obj_Persistence_Engine. Now on to the problem:

This issue is that when room change is made to a cave like above, the global dungeon coordinates are never changed. Thus the debris from the last room are instantiated. Changing the variables would result the player entering another part of the map and not the cave. I will find a solution to this problem and talk about it soon...

I hope I didnt get too technical there. Let me know if you have any questions! Cheers!  

Those are some very creepy enemies 

Also congrats on getting greenlit!

Thanks! yeah these are probably about as creepy as the game gets. Were working on plenty of other enemies all in different classes that will be equally or less creepy.

Also I'm glad to see you're back on Jarvis, its looking great man

Quick update! I've been working on a couple new elements for the overworld which are pretty standard.

The first the doorways carved into the mountain side. These will lead to shops, ambush zones, mini dungeons, other parts of the map, quest etc. It was interesting getting the collision geometry right for these as it needs to allow the player to walk through it while also deflecting attacks and preventing enemy pathing.

The next are chasms. Chasms are simply areas that prevent the player from passing until they have the gear needed to get them across. This is a really simple way to block off areas of the map when you first start. While they are not the most elegant, I think a mixture of physical barriers and difficult enemies used as barriers can keep the player in a desired location pretty organically. Still deciding if I want to allow the player to fall into them or not....

Thats all for now guys. Ill have more interesting stuff to talk about soon.

[Show offables]

The Ambassador is a twin stick shooter that allows you to pause time to evade your enemies and rewards you with gear every time you complete a level. That's it really, we just want to make a fun, polished, combat focused game. No frills, no crazy mechanics that haven't been fleshed out. Just good old fashioned fun. We've found that focusing on combat, enemies and weapons has resulted in the best experience by far so we're going to run with it.

The Ambassador has been somewhat of a nightmare to develop. We've probably redesigned the game four times at this point, each one simplifying down to what we have now. Each previous design was a bit too ambitious or just wasn't fun; however, we've learned a ton along the way. As of right now, April 2018, The Ambassador has been in development for a year and a half. We hope to finish this summer.

Show offables

Who are these dorks?

Right now the game is being worked on by Ryan Throw and TJ Acre. We both have day jobs so progress is better on some days than others. We are aiming at a release date somewhere around the summer of 2018. We both like pizza. That's about it really.

The usual social media links

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SJ8cywPxQPUAqbZ
Tumblr: https://gregorwashere.tumblr.com/

Other media  

Siliconera was kind enough to do a quick review! http://www.siliconera.com/2017/01/25/pausing-time-blessing-curse-twin-stick-shooter/
Ingare just went live and did an interview with us!http://www.ingare.tk/the-ambassador

Dude I am loving the art. Specifically how you leave it to the elements to give the scene detail and leave the ground a solid color. I imagine that can be pretty hard to pull off. props.

Hi everyone... I just realized that the gif we had included in our previous gif has been removed for some odd reason. Here is an updated gif that relates to our last post. Sorry about that... 

Hello Everyone! Sorry for the infrequent updates, we're going to try to do better in the future.

However We do have some content to show starting with the new day night cycle. So obviously we have already shown outdoor content during the day in our past updates. However over this weekend we implemented a day night cycle and we wanted to show it off. Our goal with this isn't simply for aesthetics, it will effect game play as well. During the night a few things will happen, the player will freeze to death faster, the world will be harder to navigate / enemies will be harder to spot in areas without light sources, and Shades naturally thrive in the absence of light so they will become stronger and harder to kill. This introduces the Inn mechanics as well, where the cleric can pay to stay at an Inn for the night. (All currency is in game and can only be obtained through actually playing the game. Just like rupees in Legend of Zelda. There will be absolutely zero in game transactions whatsoever. Just thought we would clarify that.)

TJ has also been working on these statues for a bit in addition to other art assets that will accompany them. These are statues of four of the five founding clerics and they will be placed in the Clerics Guild courtyard. This area will serve as a home base for the player throughout the game and we intend to show it off this week. Each of these clerics has their own back story and a religion built around their legacy. At the start of each game he player will pledge themselves to one of the four shown here. And as for the fifth? We have plans for him... 

Looks very pretty man. May I ask what the blue bar at the top is?

Hi everyone, thought I'd post an early mock up of a court yard we are working on for cleric!

Devlog: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=56476.0

The outdoor areas are looking fantastic. I particularly like the first image (snow-region). Having the snowfall really makes it come alive. I think have some outdoor exploration and purpose will go a long way, as well. Maybe hiding off-road passageways behind the trees could be fun! I'm just thinking out loud

EDIT: P.S. - I just checked out your website. It's really great! I think one thing you could add is a "contact" form that links to an email address. Just in case people want to contact you directly!

Thanks! Yeah were working on some hidden areas and what not. The difficult part is going to be the randomization of them. And your right about a contact feature for the website. We'll have that up by Friday

Nice work on the graphics! Looks pretty cool

Thank You!

I don't even mind that the art borrows heavily from Crawl.  I love that art style so much.  That itch is far from scratched as far as I'm concerned.  Really nice animation touches with the trees and grass.

Also, I like the sound of what you're dreaming up gameplay-wise.  Keep up the great work! 

Yeah we really like the style as well! Its simple enough to really bang out art assets fast yet looks so good at the same time. We're just trying our best to put a bit of a twist on it.


But anyway thank you all for taking interest! It feels really good to know that people are enjoying what we are showing 

Alright time for an update! Over the past week or so TJ and I have been focusing on creating the outdoor areas as well as creating a method for transitioning between indoors and outdoors. The solution was rather simple, put the interior rooms inside of houses and ensure that the quality of the interior mirrors the quality of the exterior of the home. This of course means that there will be house holds who are more well off than others and thus could result in better rewards!

Now we are also ensuring that the outdoor areas aren't just empty space to force the player to walk a ways to get to the next house. We have multiple ideas in the works including treants, inclement weather, dire wolves, trolls, herbs, and much much more. So with that being said we will be teasing some of these elements more frequently over the next few weeks.

Here are a few gifs that we think represent the outside world and the transition nicely

Hi everybody! So we've been working more on the game as well as social media and so on. If you'd like to see more about us and our game you can check out our website here (mobile needs some work): http://www.cleansetheafflicted.com/

No actual gameplay or art update yet but we should have something to show by Friday! Cheers!  

looking good as always man! 

Wonderful art direction. Has solid medieval flair while maintaining a lovely pixelized style. Sort of reminiscent of Sword and Sworcery (albeit a much different gameplay style)!

Thanks were happy you like it! Were really trying to push that medieval theme so that's good 

Oh, hey a new Crawl update! Cool. 

Haha yeah obviously the interiors have had some influence from crawl. Its a game both TJ and I love. However the game play, which is what our main priority is, plays nothing like crawl. cheers 

your a bad ass you can fight him whenever you want.

Awesome! I wonder how it will work. I guess it is like trying to take on the dancer early on in Dark Souls 3.

I actually haven't played dark souls 3 yet...  but basically you arrive in Holden after your long train ride from home and whenever you want to go fight the Overlord and save your sibling you get back on the train. So we can do some really cool stuff with time trials for challenge runs if we want to 

This looks and sounds really, really cool--like, exactly my type of thing. Pretty excited to follow how this develops.

Thanks! We'll be posting updates every week or so!

Dude, this game looks stunning! I love the style. Any influence from Papers Please?

Looks cool!

When you mention that the world changes as time goes on, specifically the part about people that are born and die. Is this true for the main character as well?

There could be an interesting mechanic where the next generation would have to carry on the Cleric's quest and legacy in case he/she can't do it as age gets the better of the hero

Thank you!

This is sort of true for the main character in a way. This game is a rogue like which means perma-death. So we have constructed the time mechanics around the number player deaths. For example: say there is a great statue of one of the games many deities being constructed in Holden, the workers might say something along ht lines of "Its hard work now, but it should be ready in 10 life times or so!" And over the course of your next ten lives you will see the statue's progress slowly increase until its completion. Once complete there will of course be a mechanic associated with it that would affect gameplay.

As far as the next generation carrying on the Clerics quest, who's to say we might not kill some of the higher up clerics and make you the next generation