Week 5

Sunday; January 30th, 2011

 

So the second month of development will officially begin today. I hope you enjoyed the first of several teasers I plan to make, I realize that just about nothing was animated, but I assure you that will change. This first teaser was just to show progress on map design and how Lily controls so far. I honestly haven't done any coding in awhile so maybe this coming week I'll upgrade something in the engine and talk about it. However, I've been rather focused on getting the artistic end of Project CAS done before the end of the the third month of development; so for the duration of Month Two I will be focusing on art. Speaking of art, I have a surprise...

Say hello to Lily and Castiel; two of the major characters of Project CAS! Check Week 1 if you don't know who these characters are yet. This is the first of many conceptual art pieces for CAS, so expect to be seeing some legit art updates in the coming weeks. Other than this piece of work here, let me just say that if I thought I got a lot of work done last week, I was lying, because this week I have gotten almost too much work done. I have gotten two very large (2400 x 480 and 1888 x 464) level concepts completed and have even received a bit more music from Jack Yeates. In that vein, I plan to keep artistic updates (at least in-game ones) more secretive from this point onward. I will keep you updated on exactly what I'm getting done however and maybe from time to time I'll give you guys a screenie, but for now, until more gameplay content gets complete, I think I will be keeping things closer to the chest.

 

Secrets aside, this week I completed the Grasslands location concept (it is now part Jungle) and I've completed the concept for a City environment (and said city is beautiful btw). The name of the city is a surprise for now, but it will be revealed in due time (it is one of the three cities in the game). Design wise, I have decided on designing approximately 16 locations to be explored in CAS, each location will be comprised of sectors and each sector is going to be about the size of the larger scale mock-ups I made note of earlier; there will be a minimum of 4 sectors per location and a maximum of around 15, so expect some rather large locations to explore. It takes me about 7 hours to design and map a sector, so I have a lot of work ahead of me, it's going to be great fun however. I haven't decided on the exact locations yet, but here are a few that are set in stone...

• Jungle/Grassland
• Jungle clearings
• Lakes
• Animal praires
• Cavern
• Small caves
• Mountains
• City 1 (Urban Tech City)
• Target City (I'll explain what that means another day :P)
• City 2 (Submerged City)
• Underwater base
• Dark/Night Forest
• Haunted forest
• Cruiser
• Boat

Of those six locations, there are many sub-locations with their own smaller sectors, so Project CAS is going to be rather large. Think around 200 sectors or so in size. I hope to have all of the art done within a few months, but since nothing is tiled and everything is hand drawn, it may take longer, especially if I'm going to be coding in between all of that spriting (and updating the blog, living, and other stuff...). But overall, I am very much enjoying creating this game thus far, considering I have never sprited a game from scratch or created all of the content (besides music) this experience is rather fantastic; complete with learning and everything! Yay.

Goals for next week? Get the entire story outlined and come up with all the locations (and names thereof) that will be explored. Expect greatness. Ryan Huggins ~

Total Time --> 12 hours