Week #029: So Hum A Merry Tune

Development on ______ has been going slowly but steadily. It's a tricky thing, breathing life into a whole new race. Creating the human race for HTD was one thing, since there's really only one way to do humans in a game like this. But with other playable races, such as ______, I really wanted to find a way to make them new and exciting, while maintaining what everybody loves about the ______. This can be a difficult balance to strike, and I'm personally pleased with the results so far.

I'm really looking forward to working with some of the other race ideas that Evan, Josh and myself have had further down the line, too.

With progress breaching a third of the way complete on my end, I wanted to mark the occasion with an additional teaser. I won't keep this up too much longer; since I'm no longer creating the assets themselves, I really could have revealed the ______ a week ago. But where's the fun in that?

One thing I want to stress, as I mentioned, is that these progress trackers are only following my own progress, on the conceptual and character design levels. They don't speak for the development of the actual character models or in-game assets.

If you think that I've surely been up to more than this, though, you'd be correct. Sam has also brought me on board to build a cleaner interface for Pokémon Tower Defense 2! He plans to talk about the new interface this week himself, and I got clearance to offer up a preview to go along with it.

Images represent a game currently in development.

For those of you excited for PTD2, well, you should be! It isn't my place to reveal the details, but from what I've seen and heard, it should blow the first game away.

Oh, also, ______.

Week #024: The 23 Hour Day

March 18th Update: As I mentioned, I will not be making a post this week due to my just-ending vacation. I planned to make a post only talking more about these references and where they were from, but no one knows! In the best interest of the sport of obscure trivia, I am not going to ruin the fun by revealing the sources myself. Tune in next week (March 25th), when I'll likely be talking a bit about the development process involving the first tier of light skills.

I've a lot in store for you this week! One would think I'd plan ahead more often with results like these.

First up, we have the requested and sometimes demanded cursor redesigns. With our little speed bump involving last week's release, I had a little time to finally catch up on these, both redesigning the old and coming up with some proper grabbing frames for any drag-and-drop functionality. Hopefully these are a bit more fitting.

Second, it should be known that I find weakness in wasting countless hours reading up on meaningless trivia on Wikipedia. Thanks to this, I have a great appreciation for our own HTD Wikipedia authors doing their research when it comes to references even as small as the source of my avatar. So I thought I would share a few of the in-game nods I have in store for HTD.

Some of you that have been around since the beginning may have seen these two assets before in various previews of the Fortuitous Cave. The Treasure Lord's hoard itself is home to several references that any 2004 raider should be able to spot one or two of.

Just recently - another side-effect of last week's delay - I created this weapon for use in the game (stats not final) based on something I saw in a recent addition to Netflix.

Images represent a game currently in development.

I haven't yet talked to Sam or Dan involving any sort of reward for spotting all of these references... but I'll be sure to make note of those who can!

This week may be a slow one, as I've thrown around the idea of taking the week off. As such, next week's blog post may be a quiet or completely non-existent one, but I'll be sure to check in to judge reference guesses as well as answer any questions if nothing else.

Week #023: One Week Earlier...

If I had known that these graphics weren't making it in just yet, I would have shown this off last week. As far as I know this interface is slated for release this coming thursday, but you're getting a sneak peek anyway!

Images represent a game currently in development.

A few things I've yet to fully implement are of course the final graphics for the figures, and the hero preview area (the big one). This will likely just house a placeholder for now, but will eventually be a bit more polished and dynamic.

You also have water spells to look forward to this coming week, although I unfortunately don't have much concrete to show there just yet.

Week #021: Insert Clever Title Here

As I mentioned last week, things have been slow lately, to an outside viewer. There's a lot of fixing, refining, polishing and catching up going on involving the characters, and interface design is truthfully, not all that involved or interesting.

This week, I'm going to talk a bit about one of my own ideas I've been pushing to put in the game. What was once no more than a splash of presentation just recently evolved into something with purpose, and with our time being devoted to the interface lately, you'll likely be seeing some early bits of it in the coming weeks, even if the ultimate goal might still be months off.

Introducing

Hero Figurines

The original idea for figurines actually came to me in a dream when HTD was still very early in development. Belonging to a Jumanji-style game board, the tiny figures represented your heroes as they progressed through their skill trees, represented by the paths on the board. Expecting the heroes to be held responsible for the well-being of this piece of equipment during their dangerous travels was eventually deemed illogical, and the idea was canned.

Months later, we began looking at the game's pre-battle interfaces, and when I was tasked with laying out the hero management screen, the idea made a comeback. I started with a simple goal: that these supposed figurines would be less stressful for the engine to load in a timely manner than full-blown previews of your heroes would be. The hand-carved wooden figures would be unique to your hero's race, gender, and class to assist in quickly identifying your heroes, and clicking on them once would bring up a dynamic preview elsewhere on the screen, along with options to configure their equipment and skills. Dragging the figures to another area would allow you to arrange a party before entering battle.

The current placeholders that you'll be seeing soon in-game
along with some very early development of the final figurine graphics.

I initially planned that these figurines would also be painted to match the color of your native element, but we ultimately decided that this could be confusing or misleading.

Jump ahead to just a few weeks later, and only a week ago, when the new design dawned on me: What if players could find or purchase paints for a very small fee, and paint these figurines themselves to add extra, cosmetic-only effects to their heroes? Imagine flashy auras, a little extra flare for their abilities, titles and more!

It should be stressed that this idea is of course still very early in development, and none of these exact bonuses have been decided on, and probably won't be for months to come. These examples should be considered nothing more than just that; examples.

Regardless, it's an idea that I'm very excited about and I wanted to take the chance to talk about, being one of the first ideas that I came up with on my own to contribute to HTD. I hope everyone is looking forward to it as much as I am!

In the case of the next week being another slow one, I wanted to open the gates for another question and answer session. Let 'em rip in comments and I'll answer them next week or sooner.

Week #015: Interface Improvements Anonymous ...wait.

I really wanted to make an elaborate post tonight, detailing the process we went through to improve and polish the game's interface. Two hours of severe writer's block later though and I'm pretty much too cranky to care anymore.

Images represent a game currently in development.

I'll still leave you with this development screenshot. This is more or less what you should expect the interface to look like in the upcoming build, although probably not exactly, since this isn't technically an authentic screenshot.

Note that it obviously isn't 100% complete, either. We narrowed what had to be done down to what we wanted to get done first. Fat lot of good an inventory interface does before there's an inventory to manage, right?

Apologies for the lackluster posts so far this year, I'll try to pick up the pace next week.