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 #022: Newcomer - Bill Cass

Due to the nature of interface design that I've spoken about recently, it was rather easy for me to outright forget about making a post last night. By the time I remembered, I wasn't even really sure what to go about posting.

With the addition of Bill to our team, I thought I'd take a bit to talk about him and just what he'll be doing for HTD. I've known Bill for well over a decade, and knew from the word go that he would be the one capable of matching my style without even blinking. My goal is to have him focus on what I don't necessarily excel at, and vice versa. Therefore, I'll still be handling all character animation myself. You won't have to worry about later animations looking slightly off as if they were handled by someone else or anything.

Images represent a game currently in development.

One thing he can definitely excel over me at is creature design. This is a part of the application process we put him through; to design an enemy creature for use at a later point in the game. To be clear, this is not something we're looking at including anytime soon, but are definitely filing away for a later date. I was personally really blown away by this design and some of the ideas Bill had, and I'm eager to push ahead and make it happen.

For his first assignment, Bill is hard at work on the first tier of water spells that are set to be added next week.

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 #020: Now For Something Completely Different

It may look like I haven't really done a whole lot since we finished up Maximus and got him into the game. While I did take some time off for recharging after that, you can rest assured that we're still hard at work polishing the game up. You just can't always immediately notice it.

If you've been following the progression notes, you may have noticed my entry for "character fixes/polish". This is what I've been focusing my attention on for the last week. While everything may look fine and dandy with the characters at the moment, this is because they're equipped in their full armor sets. Beneath that there are numerous graphical errors that, while hidden by the equipping of a full armor set, would have become eye sores once the characters were only wearing a few select pieces of armor instead of the whole set. Instead of putting this off until such equipment management became possible, I decided to get it done ahead of time.

Again, this is unfortunate since it's mostly behind-the-scenes work that not a lot of people will see. Even Sam and Dan were sometimes at a loss in regards to what I was talking about working on! I tried to take some before and after screenshots to show as examples this week, but I felt they weren't doing a good job of expressing just what was going on.

Instead, I have this for you.

For those of you interested in what kind of stuff I draw in the little free time I allow myself for that kind of thing, I also posted my rendition of Cave Story's Curly Brace over on my deviantArt account about a week ago.

Week #019: Choose Your Arsenal

My plans for this week's post got a little messy when I realized posting works-in-progress of Maximus was a little silly when he's already in the game.

Not really sure what else to do, since I was kind of loving the idea of taking the weekend off (or at least easy) after finishing all of that up, I figured the best idea was to show some progress on the new weapons from two weeks ago, since I kind of left that hanging afterwards to talk about Maximus instead.

Images represent a game currently under development.

Unfortunately, we had a lot more sword suggestions than we were hoping for, and since we agreed that we wanted to add other kinds of weapons to the game first, we had to be choosy about this batch. Many suggestions I made mental notes of for later (I realize there are many different kinds of swords, we just love being diverse), and some I just combined into one idea (but you can't see that one yet, hah!). Admittedly, I think the two-handed sword of my own design might have a bit of unintentional Buster Sword influence to it (and Max looks incredible dual-wielding them, FYI).

Something to always remember is that most work I show here, unless otherwise noted, should be taken as a work-in-progress of an incomplete idea. I say this mostly in regards to that mace which I'm not at all happy with yet. Kind of looks more like a street light than a mace...

Even though it was two weeks ago, it should be noted that we're always open to your suggestions and ideas when it comes to weapons, whether you have some basic ideas you'd like to see or some of your own designs you'd like to see in the game! Right now we're still looking for melee weapons, preferably not of the sword variety, for now.

Week #018: Bitmapize!

Around the middle of last week I decided it was time to get around to designing the beginner leather armor set. But I wanted to do something different. Something more than just posting a quick sketch and calling it a week.

Prior to coming on board here at Sam & Dan Games, I had messed around with the process of doing live streams for some of my more extensive sketching sessions. This never struck me as viable for the blog, since it would be hard to contact people when deciding to do one on a whim, and I wasn't keen on doing them on some kind of schedule. Time lapses sounded like a good solution!

I had the filming under control, but had trouble figuring out how to go about editing the footage. Windows Movie Maker just doesn't cut it, and I still haven't found a versatile, free and legal alternative. Eventually, fed up and frustrated, I contacted Gon and he suggest we just film the session from inside a time warp. He's capable of such things, you know.

Direct Link

Big thanks to my friend Cassie for giving me a hand with the leather armor design while I was occupied with the shadow ability graphics and a few other things this past week!

Images represent a game currently under development.

So there you have it. I'm really curious how much interest there is in stuff like this; if there's a lot, I'll be sure to try it again in the near future (although things like equipment and spell creation might not be the most interesting to watch). Be sure to let me know!

Just a reminder that this week's post coming a day earlier is not an error; I've pushed the usual post date from monday to sunday to ease off on the tension of getting a post together on my already-hectic mondays. It already feels much more comfortable to me, although that may be thanks to having this post ready since thursday night...

I'm also hunting for versatile, free and legal video editors for a potential future in "The Making of HTD" videos, if anyone has any experience on that front.