Oh man, this guys art is so bad…it took me a while to be convinced it wasn’t sarcastic. Check it out some time if you have nothing better to do with your eyeballs.
TWO-FOLD UPDATE!
I got a lot accomplished tonight! For one, I added the map, which also finalizes the functionality for the Watchtowers! You can see this in the first screenshot, the map is in the lower-left corner of the screeny. The map shows VERY limited information, no floating islands, no player built units except for Watchtowers (yellow dots). It shows the players position (Blue diamond) and the Harbor/spawn point (center white cross) as well.Watchtowers will turn red if an enemy is within their range. This doesn’t necessarily mean an enemy is attacking your watchtower or a nearby settlement, it just means an enemy has been detected nearby.
The second screenshot showcases the new Water Goddess Major Spell. Originally I had planned on her Major Spell being a defensive buff for the player, but after having given it some thought I realized that it would be much more beneficial to the player to have an area of effect Healing spell for Units! The AoE for the spell is always the same (roughly screensized) but the amount it heals for is determined by the number of Water Temples the player controls.
This is great progress though! All but one unit (Dig Sites) has their full functionality. After that, a lot of the stuff left over before I can release an alpha client for people to play is essentially odds n’ ends. Stuff like a resource trading shop, stage progression, saved game slots, enemy functionality, etc.
This is the original untranslated interview I did with the indie shelter. If you’d like to read the original (in italian) scroll down the blog just a bit and click on the link.
1) First of all, the usual: tell us about yourself!
1) I’m a freelance artist and animator fulfilling my…
Heya guys! No progress worthy of posting tonight, but I wanted to let you know about this interview that I recently did with theindieshelter! They’re a really cool site that seems genuinely interested in promoting indie developers. You’ll have to translate the page if you don’t speak Italian. I’ll eventually go ahead and post the native english version of the interview here on the tumblr since the translated version can be a bit weird in certain parts.
Updated UI!
So I bit the bullet today and reworked some of the UI for building. You can see the old UI in the screenshot on the right. The major problem with it was that the bar that came out and denoted the Unit Cost would obstruct the players view. On the plus side it was immediately apparent what Unit was associated with that cost, but it just wasn’t working.
So I spent the evening reworking it and putting some placeholder text in for the costs. The new UI has the “cost bar” located in the bottom-left corner of the screen, its further away from the rest of the build UI, but it doesn’t obstruct the players view like the old UI did.
This is John Starr’s work. John Starr is a good friend of mine. You should follow him. He draws those chalkboard pieces you see hanging in your local grocer, and he makes sure that the ones he draws are awesome.
Unit Harvesting works!
However, I cannot take credit for this, one enterprising redditor, who as a result will be noted in the “special thanks” section of the credits, did that. Reminder to all the folks following ANOW, I’m not much of a programmer by any stretch of the imagination. Up until now I had required little help on ANOW, but this problem was beyond my knowledge.
But it’s implemented now! This means that most of the Units now have their full functionality in place. The only ones that do not at this point are some of the more unique units, such as Watchtowers. This is primarily because I’m still deciding on how I want them to work (for instance, I know that watchtowers will alert the player to enemy presence within their area of influence, but how they do that is still under consideration.)
In any case, enjoy this screenshot of a settlement with real purpose! All the units in that photo actually DO something now, which is pretty awesome!
Another thing I’ve done some work on is the “Obelisks”. You can see two of them glowing red in this photo. This is because Temples have been built on all the holy ground surrounding them. Lighting up the obelisks is a requirement to progress through the game, so it’s nice to make some headway on that as well. They have a really neat animation when they are glowing as well.
This was my submission, I am still dealing with this guy.
A client cancelled an e-transfer for overdue payment. After asking him about it, he offered to send a check. Three weeks later…
Me: Hey, did you ever send that check out? I really can’t continue to work on this project until I see some money from it.
Client: You can’t just ask me for money whenever you want it.
Me: But you said there was a check in the mail.
Client: Obviously you don’t understand the sacrifices I have to make as a small business owner.
