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I love the concept, I'm curious to how much depth you'll give the stories and variety.

The in game art is alright. Seems like rendering some shadows would help. As far as textures I wouldn't do filters, or at least rarely, try playing with the brush and see if you can't have more luck.

Maybe this will help:



That poster art needs some serious love. As someone whose art also needs work I'm not sure I've got the info you need to improve it. Maybe simplify the art first? That flaring sun is just not working.

[Dewfreak83]

I love the concept, I'm curious to how much depth you'll give the stories and variety.

Well I think I have the variety. Depth is more of an "eh". The focus is on replay-ability. There are 3 categories of "stories":

background:
The player describes their background through childhood events, which helps to define who they are and their characteristics - as well as starting items. The setting of the World is also chosen here. 3 types of backgrounds are planned, with several variations that will be randomized for the player.

events:
Best described as short-stories. Some "event" or "thing" is troubling the towns. You have to choose-your-way through the story and try to find out the problem or stop it. These short stories can advance into something more difficult if left unattended - or could close down / destroy the township if really left alone to fester. These are randomly chosen. I currently have 12 short stories planned.

main story arc:
This is probably the most depth that will be found in the game. This is the main quest or conflict that the player must surpass throughout his journey. This involves characters and happenings from the past (building on the background). The story arc is chosen randomly - but is based on decisions from the past. Currently have 9 story arcs planned.

The in game art is alright. Seems like rendering some shadows would help. As far as textures I wouldn't do filters, or at least rarely, try playing with the brush and see if you can't have more luck.

Maybe this will help:

Neat video - learned about color levels in it! Yeah, I'm slowly improving the art as I'm improving my skills. I do prefer painting over filters as well - things like the paper I think make sense to use a filter or two though.

That poster art needs some serious love. As someone whose art also needs work I'm not sure I've got the info you need to improve it. Maybe simplify the art first? That flaring sun is just not working.

Heh, I hear ya. I know what I want it to look like - but I'm struggling to find the skills to get it there. I've watched a few more youtube videos on painting a landscape so I'll give it another stab when I get closer to creating a trailer (2-3 months). Is the poster art so bad I should just take it down?

Thanks so much for your interest! What specific thing about the concept do you like? What are you hoping I don't "drop the ball on" - is it mainly the variety and depth of the stories that you would be looking forward to?

[Dewfreak83]

Did some design work on the cards - I wanted a more tarot card like style that was minimalized but still communicated what the card did well from a quick glance or at a very small size.

[Luachra]

Did some design work on the cards - I wanted a more tarot card like style that was minimalized but still communicated what the card did well from a quick glance or at a very small size.

Love the look of the cards, the swords are interesting and look like they would increase in damage from left to right due to their design, however if they are going to appear small on the screen maybe try working the designs again as black silhouettes first in order to create some instantly recognizable shapes, then you can work the finer details in on top. Top stuff

[Dewfreak83]

look like they would increase in damage from left to right

Yeah I think the blade silhouette on the right-most looks more threatening even though the one in the middle is more powerful. Might switch them around - thanks for the input!

[Dewfreak83]

New Mascot and Logos for the company - let me know what you think? Is he plush worthy? 

[Dewfreak83]

Working on the game icon, but not really liking how it came together. I wanted it to feel like the knight is materializing from the book, but also wanted to integrate the elemental shield I commonly use in reference material...maybe a bit too busy.

Could really use some feedback / suggestions!

[Canned Turkey]

A, but I think the rays could be a bit less saturated

[Dewfreak83]

A milestone indeed - I put the game on the new Nvidia Shield Tablet!!! I'm so excited, besides with one small snafu everything works as expected!



Now to get a playable alpha to carry around on the holidays. Awesome! 
Oh and Nvidia just got a new fanboy with this tablet. It is bad ass.

[Dewfreak83]

Awesome milestone today: showed the game for the first time (besides my wife) at a indie meetup... and they actually thought it was cool! Maybe they were just being nice/friendly... but I'll take it!

[Dewfreak83]

I added perks and shopping, but they come at a cost... and its more than just gold!



The player can visits towns that are not under distress (no events) to shop and collect that town's perk. There are 6 towns, and 6 unique perks to collect. Although, if a player visits a town there is the risk that events at other towns could escalate and place those towns into greater peril or be lost altogether!

Since the player will only ever see 3 of the 6 towns on a play-through, and it isn't necessarily feasible for them to collect all the perks I'm hoping this adds a point in the "replay" column! 

[Dewfreak83]

Back when I use to mod for the Half-Life engine, one of the most useful tools was the dev console. These days you can iterate so quickly and re-launch your game (using higher level tools/languages) that sometimes you forget about tools that allow you to tweak or change things at runtime. After demonstrating the game several times and having to click-spam through sections to showcase the important features, I finally added a developer's panel!



It's ugly, but that's fine - its really just for me to use during testing or demo'ing.

[Dewfreak83]

Working on adding some things to help the player pick up on some concepts in the game. This one is meant to be an excerpt from a historical book on the "human" race. My primary aim is to teach the player the symbols for the 4 main stats, as they'll see them "popping up" in the following few pages.

[desttinghim]

This looks like a really cool project! I like the progress you've made with the art - it's really impressive. I'd love to try this out some time; it looks like it's my cup of tea as a game.

[Dewfreak83]

I've added the "back page" of the inventory that the player receives upon graduating from the Heroes Guard training camp. The front mostly showed your equipment and stats, so this page shows your conditions and abilities:



I'm still working on the icons that will go to the left of the player portrait, but thinking of taking a break from this task and working on some fake 3-D dice rolling...

As always, feedback of any level is greatly appreciated! 

[desttinghim]

Looks good! The most enticing part for me is probably the reading. I love to read. CYOA/GameBooks have always  interested me, though I haven't played many (those that I did play were mostly CYOA, though I did play part of Grey Star the Wizard).

[Dewfreak83]

I host the weekly Text Piece Tuesday thread on reddit, where I often share small snippets of the story. I reserve this devlog mostly for design, art, and screenshots (it's what the people love!), but here is a snippet from this week taken from the short-story The Dark Ones:
^{The player has just chosen to open a large stone door on a tomb. Part way through, they had to make a "saving throw" when a surprise encounter occurs!}

The tomb door was solid stone, nearly three inches thick. It screeched and scratched as I slowly swung it open. Once it was wide enough to enter, I stepped forward... greeted by a zombie lurching for my throat!

[Strength test passed]

I threw the zombie to the side. It made a loud crunch as its head slammed against the stone wall. After ensuring the creature was disposed of, I stepped into the tomb. To my surprise, the tomb was not dark. Several glyphs hummed with power and cast a dark red light across the contents inside. At first, I thought the tomb to be now vacated...

If the dark robed man hadn't raised his head and revealed red glowing eyes, he would have blended right into the walls. As he raised his hands, dark tendrils of smoke shot outwards hitting me in the chest. I was knocked backwards onto the ground just outside of the tomb.

As I stood to catch my breath, the dark clad man approached the entrance and glared at me with his red glowing eyes.

[Change scene to card-combat]

[Dewfreak83]

Phew! So I found that folks just didn't "get it" when i used a spinning token to represent a dice roll. Which sucks, because that was heck of a lot easier to create than hand drawn dice!

After about 10 hours of drawing and creating the sprite sheet, I think I pulled it off!



As I mentioned before, I'm a programmer by trade and just a wanna-be artist. So I'm curious: how long should animating the roll of each side of the dice take for an "average" artist?

Anyways, I always love feedback so leave some love (or hate...)!

[Dewfreak83]

Big milestone hit today - Alpha builds were sent out!

I've started the beta review process on Apple and have already sent out Android alpha builds. Apple was a huge pain to get to just this stage - we'll see how the beta review process goes...

Below you can see all the devices I have to test on. It's lots of work testing, fixing, re-building, re-uploading, re-testing (rinse and repeat).

[Dewfreak83]

Wow Mail Chimp is great! I created an account, imported contacts, created a template, and started my first newsletter campaign all in about 45 minutes!



I didn't waste much time on it, as its only going out to close family & friends. Their WYSIWYG editor is nice though, and I'll be able create something pretty nice for any "real" newsletters.