It’s been some time since my last update; I was at Slush (a huge startup and tech event in Helsinki) and we had a great reception there. I’ll be talking more about the whole event later on, but for now I wanted so share what our Programmer/Designer Lauri posted earlier this week.
He talks a bit about creating the initial prototype on paper, then moving onto Excel prototype(Excel can be a great tool in prototyping certain kinds of games) and what kinds of systems does the game have for a designer.
It’s been a while and I’ve super busy with wrapping up some things so we can focus solely on Ancestory, but we also had really nice stuff happening behind the scenes which I can’t talk about yet, but we’ll (hopefully) reveal all that quite soon.
I wanted to show you guys how we came up with our main character the Shaman:
The current 3D version can found in the article, but as we come back from the holidays we plan on upgrading all of our 3D models and also rework nearly all of the animations. The original 7-week schedule to a fully playable game was a bit unforgiving in some aspects, but it was for the better as we’ve learned a lot about the pipelines we are going to use and also had an animator from Riot to teach us and look at our work as well as another traditional 2D animator teaching our guys some basics. Our final versions will look so much better than if we’d committed to finishing them in the first pass.
It’s been a while and we are all now fully charged thanks to the holidays. No real news right now expect that we’ve moved into an office of our own. Our artist also did a little sketch for this year, though I am little late posting this:
What I wanted to ask though is any particular topics you might be interested in about Ancestory or any aspect of the development process. We will be continuing our development blog soon, but we don’t have any particular topics thought of yet and we really want to talk about stuff that people here might be interested in.
It’s been quite some time since our last update, but fear not; we’ve been hard at work doing a lot of R&D on Unreal Engine 4 and set up our pipelines for recreating some character at a higher quality and more importantly much, much better animations.
With the inclusion of Tuukka, our Environment Artist, we will be able to create more detailed environments and we are currently redoing them from the ground up and also plan on creating additional environment varieties. We should be able to share our vision of the new levels in the coming weeks.
But the big news for today are that we were chosen for the Indie Prize Showcase at Casual Connect Amsterdam from 4th to 6th of February. So feel free to come and say hi to us and of course try out our early pre-alpha version of the game.
We had a great experience at Casual Connect in Amsterdam and got the chance to meet some guys from Epic as well which was great. I’ll be doing a proper post about the Greenlight and Event during this week to share with you, but right now I just wanted to thank you all for the support you’ve given us!
Thank you, we’ll still make sure to post frequent updates and with the development now ramping up double-time, we should have some pretty exciting stuff for you
-Readability: How well can you find all the necessary information and how does it compare against the game world?
-Element placement: is everything in a logical place and how does compare to games of the same genre (TBS and TGC)
-Quality: How visually pleasing is the overall style?
We’ve already made a few changes to adapt the concept into placeholder art so the programmers can start implementing the functionality, but now we need some more feedback to nail the style down. The UI artist is currently working on the new Card design so I’ll be sure show them once we have something concrete.
UI’s been progressing well on the programming front and we will be testing and improving it in the coming days, but here’s also some quick sketches of the card design:
[http://abload.de/img/cardconceptsthumbelucd.png
We’ve now made the change to UMG and completely redesigned the UI. Things are progressing fast and we will be showcasing all the new features publicly during Nordic Game Conference, come to talk to us if you’re in the neighbourhood
Some work-in-progress material for our new cards, rendered inside UE4:
The icons will still be worked on and it’s missing all the text and numbers since we had to change the text rendering system a bit, but it’s all 3D and there will be some nice animations in-game
We are currently working hard to get a great build for the Nordic Game Conference, but I’ll also try to get a post about the whole design process of the cards up soon(-ish).
So Nordic Game was a massive success for us and it was great meeting guys from Epic and we got some great tips too. We should have some proper material coming next week, but until then here’s a little taste of what’s to come:
[http://abload.de/img/thumb1r3uc5.jpg
Still going strong and we are on the way in finishing the functionality and art of all the menus. Gameplay side has really progressed well over the past few weeks to and we have pretty much the core of the game in, just needs fine-tuning, balancing and we still have quite a few cards to make. We are also working towards a completely different level environment for some of the maps.
It’s a slightly old concept with some legacy stuff popping behind the elemements, but it’s nearly the same in the actual game right now and I’m currently working on the scale. Do you feel it should be a bit smaller or some elements should be more pronounced or you don’t understand the information available?
All the core gameplay features have been in for a while not and we’ve focused a lot in getting the multiplayer working well and improving the whole user experience. Part of it was to redo major graphical parts of the whole UI, but also create all working profile and lobby screens. Through some added minion skills we’ve also tried add some extra depth and address the balance issues you get from having an async game where one player gets a starting advantage.
We aren’t accepting people in droves at least just yet, but feel free to PM if you’re interested in trying out the game
