It’s been sometime since the last post, but we’ve made some good progress since last and finally shipped the rought cut of the trailer to the musicians (still doing some little adjustments to it at the same time, though).
Our Sound Designer, Tero, also posted an update to our IndieDB page detailing his experiences in making the game and the sound development:
Update #3 - Sounds of Ancestory
It’s been a huge step forward for us in sounds, with a DAW, a proper sound library and high-quality microphones. We also have access to a little sound studio at our Uni, even though the place turns into a sauna really quickly because it has no air conditioning, it’s still a really great thing to have in the development environment:
For the actual development of the game we listened to the feedback we got on the necessity of AI and two of our programmers did a little game jam for it last week. Now we have a working AI in the game and even in it’s simplicity it’s already working pretty well. There are some super-effective tactics against it and most people have defeated it a bit too easily, but I’m really happy how well it’s turned out and how fast Mikko and Joni got it working. It’s using the behavior trees inside Unreal Engine 4, so I will be personally be delving into them eventually as a designer, but we should also have an coming update from the programmers detailing how they made the AI and how did the little “game jam” work as developing new features into an existing game.
Here’s also a little peek at a blueprint we have for one of the sound effects:
Tero would also like eventually try integrating Wwise or FMOD into the game and UE4, but we might leave that for next year as we are still also designing a lot of AV-side to make it a lot more better than what we have with this initial 7-week alpha version.
Oh, and as a little addition, they also got Hotseat-mode working as well, but we need to the Menu/UI support right now to make the game support the Online/Hotseat/AI -modes with the same executable. We’d also love to hear what are your thoughts on the game modes you would like to see Ancestory support.
So at the moment we are now finishing the required material for the Greenlight, including the trailer and a gameplay video, and trying to contact some press as well as working on the AI and getting the Deckbuilder to work on the latest Unreal Engine version. The Greenlight should now be only a few weeks away so it’s really, really busy time for us, but it’s also really exciting times and I can’t wait to see what will happen.