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[waxx]

PLATFORM | SLASHER | FUCKEM 'UP | MYTHOLOGICAL

Whaddup guys. You probably don't know me (how dare you ) but you should since awesome game is about to faceroll the industry. Or at least that's the plan.

What is this project?
So I was playing around with skeletal animation and suddenly felt like doing slasher. I contacted ANtY that is more recognized on this forum and we've hooked up to do one. The idea is to create it fast for the techdemo version with few levels and then think more and see how can it evolve.

More about game please?
Sure. Player will control a badass Celtic warrior and smash his way through waves of barbarians in order to defend his village and destroy theirs. Satisfaction from literally obliterating your enemies as well as mythological, mysterious world will help you to 'feel' the game.

Features aka cut the crap

• Interesting and intriguing world that will blend prehistoric landscape and our abstraction
• Blood
• Damn satisfying fights
• Blood
• Feeling awesome

Tech
C# XNA

Updates?
ANtY should come by here soon and post some mockups to give you guys better look. Apart from that we've decided to update this thread daily by giving details about tech stuff and art work in turns. So one day there will be news from codefield and the other ANtY will show off with his cool drawings.

Stay tuned!

[ANtY]

Hello, so as waxx said before we will be updating this thread daily by turns.

Here is some little mockup of the game, there will be black bars on the top and bottom of the screen to give the game some epic movie feeling.



And here is WiP of the main character sprite with some useless crappy shit in the background (like I couldn't leave it white...)

[waxx]

DAY #2 - CODEFIELD

Spent few hours on editor today. Basic skeleton operations work and that means setting up relations, offsets, origins and draw order. Tomorrow shall come animations. Or I should say editing, because core is already written and I can even load one from XML file (if I would care to manually write it :<).

Sprite not related

[ANtY]

DAY #3 - ART UPDATE

• Main hero sprite is finished and ready to be animated (waxx   )
• Almost finished Druid sprite
• Some raw concept of the Blacksmith character

I've also sketched the hero's hamlets. There will be 3 important places and the rest will be just living chalets, huts and shacks. Druid will be the character that gives us most of quests (for now we have only planned 2 quests for the playable version of the game, it's gonna be heavy simplified and then we will see how it should evolve). Blacksmith will be probably the shop-guy, but it's not planned for the version of the game we are currently heading to.
Okay, lets cut the crap, here goes the eye-candy




BTW: EZ guys! We barely deal with this amount of feedback!  

[Belimoth]

I like it, can't wait to see it animated.

[Netsu]

Nice work, wish you best of luck and waiting for some animations

[davidp]

hey guys, is that bone animation tool in-house or is that something i could go and download from the nets?
it's interesting that i've been looking all over the place lately for something like that, even started developing my own but ditched everything

looking sweet

edit: so hyped about it, i didn't even read the post when i saw the picture. any chance you'll release that to public, for others to use? that would be mega awesome.

[PompiPompi]

I like the druid, his fabric\cloth folds very nicely.

[waxx]

DAY #4 - CODEFIELD

• Fixed tons of bugs!
• Added skeleton saving into XML file as well as loading it up
• Fixed CRAPLOAD of bugs :<
• Picked up some work on animations
• New game name! The Birtch
  

So I've started some work on animation tab in our editor today and came across good idea with ANtY. We'll put down a timeline that will represent frames that you can click. If it will be new frame it will be marked keyframe and all frames before that one will be marked as "normal". What that means if you edit the keyframe editor will automatically edit other normal frames between next keys and create interpolated path to that frame's transformation. Pretty cool, huh? Of course you can add keyframes anywhere you want - just eddit the 'normal' one and it will become new standalone keyframe.




@davidp
Hmm... We'll consider releasing it to certain people on certain terms if they're interested. Stay tuned for news!

Thanks for feedback by the way, really appreciate it!

[ANtY]

@Netsu and Belimoth: Hopefully I'll be able to show you some animations in the next art update :p

@Pompi Pompi: Thanks! It really means much to me because earlier I was drawing awful clothing, without any folds, etc. couldn't imagine how it works.

DAY #5 - ART UPDATE

• Logo for the game finished
• GUI for the game
• Background elements
• Quest mark
• Shaman character (you won't meet him in the hero's village)
• Wallpaper with Shaman  
• Final background for the game
• Designed dialog scenes

I've spent some time concepting how the background elements will look and we've agreed with waxx that this is cool enough :p
I tried the dialogs to look as much cinematic as possible. I've also tried to animate a blood squirt but I'm a terrible animator, especially for fluids...  

WALLPAPER (1920x1080)

[kamac]

I'm touched. I'd like to see more gameplay throught.

Can you make that wallpaper 1440x900 too? It's awesome.

[ANtY]

Thanks, of course, here you go

http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/4743/wallpaper1440.jpg

[waxx]

DAY #6 - CODEFIELD

• Implemented changing position in animations
• Added keyframes and interpolation between nearest two
• You can set up additional keyframes by just changing 'keyframe' frame
• Added preview of animation with framerate change option
• Started putting rotating code, although it is still buggy (I had hopes for it to get done today, but after 2 hours I'm still running into ridiculous shit)

I won't post any new screens as this will be pretty much the same, so what i'm gonna do is upload video probably next codefield update and show you guys (hopefully fully working) editor and its cool features. For now I still have tons of bugs to track and have to dig into XML code and implement loading/saving and that is painful

[ANtY]

DAY #7 - no update

Unfortunately I won't post anything today because I'm not at home every second weekend so I can't do any artwork. Instead I was designing world map, plot and some characters.

[PompiPompi]

So the guy with the spear will be actually skinned?(skeleton).

[waxx]

DAY #8 - CODEFIELD

• Animation editing is finally done!
• Tweaked the way skeleton is rendered
• Rewrote huge chunk of anims handling and transformations code

I could probably name more aspects that I covered in last two days of my work but hey - what's the point? Essential part is that I can finally edit animation with all the rotating that works smoothly and interpolates the way it is supposed to. I'll code saving tomorrow and then start to work on game engine itself. FINALLY.

Below little teaser from the editor (I know there was supposed to be vid but this thing is still kinda raw)



 
@PompiPompi
Yes, we'll use for him (and other characters) our skeletal animation system.

[davidp]

Oh my, this is amazing

[ANtY]

DAY #9 - 'ART' UPDATE


Barbarian concept

Yeah, I know it's not much but for my excuse I came home yesterday's evening and I got caught up by doing photo studies ( http://everyday-im-drawing.blogspot.com/2011/11/cesar-wip.html )  

I talked with waxx and he agreed with my ideas about gameplay details. When we started the project we didn't decide anything besides that it's gonna be a celtic slasher in an abstract world. When I wasn't home I had some time to think about the game and now we have everything designed.
It's gonna be a mix of a slasher and something that I call 'experience game', but 'exploration' should fit here too.

We know already how will traveling between different places work and I have some cool ideas and sketches for some of those places.

tl;dr:
We will show you some cool stuff ASAP  

[waxx]

DAY #10 - CODEFIELD

• Loading animations done!
• Saving animation also done!

Yeah, not that much today but my schedule is quite tight lately and I was really busy in past two days... To make things worse my mouse semi works at the moment. Right button seems totally broken and left button reacts to 1/20 of my clicks (good luck coding with that). I ordered new one yesterday but unfortunately I'm still waiting for the delivery. Hope to get this crap solved as soon as possible.

[ANtY]

DAY #11 - ART UPDATE

• Nearly finished Barbarian Warrior's sprite
• Barbarian Man At Arms sketch
• Barbarian Shaman sketch

Tried to use the Skeletal Animation software that waxx made but we've found some things to tweak because atm the app isn't very user friendly ^^