Casting!

All characters and head morphs are complete! There is a cast of 30+ characters and each one looks as unique as I could have made them. I have added some of them into the level and am now in the slow procedure of adding in their dialog tree's. Since I have no idea how to script, I might look for some help soon, or perhaps I'll dab into it a bit with the help of Sunjammer's excellent demo's. Its great to see the level becoming populated after all these months, things are really starting to shape up now! Again, sorry for the lack of updates, RL still has a strangle hold on me for the time being.

In other news, go see Inception! Easily one of the best movies in recent memory. Extremely ambitious stuff from Nolan, you can see why this took him nearly 10 years to write. Also, Starcraft 2 is released tuesday. Not sure where I can fit this into my busy schedule, but damn is it looking good. I'm mainly after it for the campaign believe it or not, I'm not really into the competitive multiplayer thing..

Anyway, hope you had a nice weekend and check back soon for more updates!

Bloggin hell!

What a turgid week I'm having! In the process of looking for a new job with some interviews lined up next week.. My number 1 priority at this time is to get out of my current situation. Spending most of my free time clicking "apply to job" across various job sites. However! I have still managed to design like 6 characters this morning from CI, just to take a wee break from all the dialogue writing.

In gaming news, the new Xbox "slim" launched in Europe yesterday. Apparently its making a killing for Microsoft and they're reporting major stock shortages across all regions. Whats funny is, when I took a pair of these out of their larger brown transit box, the new box is just as weighty as the old revision.. In fact the box appears bigger? Strange! I'll stick with my 3 year old 20gb Xbox for now thanks.

The Develop conference also took place this week and for me the most interesting topic of discussion was digital distribution vs. boxed retail product and which model was more attractive for Indy developers in particular. Very interesting stuff, have a listen here http://www.eurogamer.net/blog.php?type=podcasts.

Sorry for the lack of updates the past few days, such is the nature of my life at the moment!

Sticky Brain?

Sorry for the lack of blogs over the last few days, been up to my eyes in work amongst other things. Anyway, where am I asks you. Craggy Island is coming along as planned. Writing a script and connecting up the conversations/quests/story arcs etc has proven very challenging and thats just on paper! I've not done this kind of thing before so its a learning process alright, but so far I'm rather happy with the results. Really enjoying it though, feels great to have the auld brain ticking again.

A short blog today then, just going to get back to the drawing board and keep the juices flowing.
Hope you all had a nice weekend, I'll be back tomorrow with more updates!

The poor trees..

Nothing much to report today, things are going well. The walls of my room are literally covered in conversation trees, family trees, plot and story trees.. All scribbled on A4 pages, which were derived from trees.. The level itself is practically done, just a few minor tweaks here and there but that can be updated down the road. I have some of the characters build, including face morphs. Most interiors are linked up now and from a quick playtest, everything seems fine.

In between this, I gave Aion a quick stab. Very fancy looking but very grindy and sloooow. Dont think I'll have the patience to continue!

Also, awesome news from Bioware today, with the inevitable announcement of Dragon Age 2. From the sounds of it, it might be taking a more "Fable" approach, giving you a preset main character that you play as, who's actions moulds the world and story. They harp on about improved graphics and a better combat system amongst other things. Looking forward to hearing more.

Shattered, so I'll catch 40 winks, goodnight!

Back on track.

A rough day it has been, with official news of a paycut making its way through to my desk, I sure am in need of some cheering up. Its not all doom and gloom however, if you have been following my project page, you'll notice that I have finally managed to solve the errors that were severely halting progress on CI. I've exported the entire island into the game now, compiled a list of small graphical glitches, most of which are now ironed out and overall I'm quite happy with the results. I'm equally happy with the ~28FPS I'm getting with the game maxed out, considering I spared no expense with tesselation, lighting, vegetation, vfx etc..

Over the last month or so, I have developed some idea's outside of the scope of Craggy Island. I may look at doing more work with the toolset down the line, depending on how this one turns out.

In other news, look out for a lovely little title on its way to PSN/XBLA on the 13/14th of July respectively - Deathspank, from the creator of the Monkey Island games. If your into Diablo style RPG's or Day of the Tentacle type adventure games, Deathspank promises a perfect marriage of the two. With the quiet summer months now upon us, it should be the perfect little filler until something meatier comes along, say in the form of Starcraft 2 on July 27th, or Mafia 2 on the same day in August. Check out the website for Deathspank: http://www.deathspank.com/

Take care for now.

Busy weekend!

As with every weekend, I tend to have very little time in front of the computer. Its damn tiring working in 30 degree heat, we have no air con, so it really saps it out of you. The little bit of free time I have had, has been spent tinkering my the level, trying to get around this cursed error I've been getting. Its proving quite a challenge, I suppose the biggest pain is that in order to see if a simple change has fixed the issue, I have to wait at least 1 hour to render lightmapping each time.. To be honest I haven't got much structure to the process at the moment, I'm sort of making a random tweak here and there and hoping it will fix it. I have all day monday to have a proper crack at solving this, so I'll go about creating a detailed list of things I have to try, things I have tried, combinations of both and so on. Hopefully with a bit of help from the Bioware community, I should be able to get this project back on track soon enough.

Keep checking back!

Edit: Aha! Perhaps I may have identified the problem! I got a failed Local Posts after doing all the correct steps beforehand, then I created a new Area Property and re-did all the steps, Posted all, and it worked perfectly! Hmms. Seems there was something fubared with my original setup. Will look into this a bit more before getting too excited.