next »

[JMickle]

What an UNindie way of talking 

you sound like one of those awkward embarrassing dads trying to sound hip with the kids

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

to destroy aaa games one must become aaa games

[Chris Whitman]

Paul Eres: Sleeper Agent.

[moi]

to destroy ass one must become ass

[Alex May]

This is just so completely beautiful and I'm really looking forward to it after I loved Immortal Defense so much.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

45 new screenshots have been added to its facebook page for those interested: http://on.fb.me/lmEiQd

i'm going to try to update the facebook page more regularly (on teegee's suggestion). here's one of the new ones:

[Craig Stern]

Looking good! I'm still looking forward to seeing this released.

(Also: is it just me, or is there a statue of Cthulu hanging out in the middle of screenshot 2?)

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

haha -- i don't know if orchard-l was consciously inspired by cthulu or not, but now that you mention it yeah

[Headless Man]

This game looks really fantastic, Paul - looking forward to playing it.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

btw, i want to enter the game into more rigorous playtesting eventually (hopefully within a month or two), so if anyone wants to help test it, let me know. preferably people with game design experience (e.g. people who have completed games) and people who are 'regulars' on this forum (e.g. no level 0 people or people who barely post here) since they're more likely to have good advice and less likely to leak the game to the public like that guy did with vvvvvv on 4chan. so let me know if anyone is interested who meets those qualifications.

[Destral]

Looking really good!

I'd love to help playtest it whenever you're ready to add more testers.

[Chris Pavia]

If you don't mind us commercial game designer sell-outs then I'd love to check it out.

[Craig Stern]

I'd be happy to help.

[Zaphos]

I'd love to playtest this

[EssentialNutrients]

I'd love to playtest!  (My old account was like like level 10 so nyeeeehhhh)

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

thanks for the volunteers; will PM you guys when i want to test the game (which may be soon or may be later, i'd expect a month from now)

for those who don't follow my LJ (which is the real 'devlog' for this game, link's in my sig) recently i listed all the tasks that need to be done before the game is complete -- there were 840 tasks remaining at that time. i'm now down to 797. right now i'm working on sound effects. there are a lot of game actions which do not currently have associated sound effects, so i've been fixing that

one of the things i like about SD is that it uses two simultaneous looping background sounds: first, the music, and second, the soundscape (ambient background sounds). the balance between the two changes depending on the actions and movement of the player: so if you sit still quietly, gradually the music fades away and you can only hear the sounds around you (the birds chirping, the wind blowing, etc.), and then when you move again the music picks up again in volume and the ambiance fades away. but i'm a bit short on soundscapes, and some of the ones i have i think can be improved, so next after sound effects are done i want to edit some more of those soundscapes

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

decided (after reading the 'archer' devlog) to update this devlog weekly with what i did in the past week

this last week i've been focusing entirely on the "camp mode" dialogue scripts, which is the main way that you can talk to the other people on your ship. each of the characters has topics that they can talk about, and each of these topics becomes unlocked when it's relevant (for instance, you can't talk to a character about a particular creature until you've actually seen that creature)

i'm almost done with these camp mode dialogue scripts (in total there are 320 of them, i wrote 83 of them this week, only 12 remain to write), will definitely finish them up next week, but i also want to make a few changes to camp mode, such as indicating to the player which topics he's talked to a character about already, and improving the appearance of selecting these topics

the idea for camp mode came from the first persona game: i liked that you could talk to the people on your team pretty much in any room, and that most of the story in the game came from the optional interactions between your characters rather than npc dialogue. and it came from vanguard bandits, where, after each level, you could choose some people on your team to talk to. SD's camp mode isn't set up like either of those two games, but the basic idea of the story being told through dialogue between a small set of characters rather than through running around towns and talking to copious amounts of NPCs while your characters are mostly silent is the same. the latter breath of fire games (BoF3 and BoF4) and the grandia games have a similar 'camp' system, with tents and fireplaces and everything, and it's named after those 'camps' even though it's not an actual camp in this game

[Eclipse]

omg I'd love to playtest too! please say you still accept testers

Or even better, start the preorders so I can give you and play the beta right now

[baconman]

If I can get a working comp together again, I'd like to get in on this action, too. PM me when it's test-ready, and see where I'm at... although I'll be doing a lot of recovering of things once that happens, too. Screens are looking very superpro!

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

may have preorders in a few months or so; will see. i also need to begin promoting the game with trailers and stuff, i've been neglecting that

thanks to the new volunteers; will pm you guys when i send out the next playtesting version (which may take a while, i want to do finish my latest overhaul of creature code first, as well as finish all the dialogue)

anyway, weekly progress report: mainly continued writing dialogue scripts, but also added a system where you can see if you've talked to someone about a topic in camp mode already (those topics are highlighted if they're new)

next week: the plan is to continue finishing up the game's dialogue (at least the first draft of it). and i still need to improve the appearance of the camp mode menu. i doubt i'll finish all the scripts this next week, but if i do i'll start on my planned creature code revisions

for reference, this is what camp mode looks like now (the screenshot is old but it still looks basically like this, which is kind of ugly -- each number is a different topic; in this case, this is venus's camp mode, and each number is a different lake creature which she'll talk about if you ask her about it and if you've already seen that creature)