Introduciiiiing Frimp! Frimp is the latest monster we’re implementing into the game, with over half of his animation completed. Once he’s done we’ll be moving on from the monster phase, at least for Beta. We have some exciting developments right around the corner! Pretty soon we’ll have a forum set up as a place to talk with backers and, eventually, to get feedback from beta testing. The game has really shaped up in the past few weeks, so I’m excited to share what we’ve accomplished!  Stickertiiime! I’ve begun mailing out the stickers for all the Dungeon Panic backers who ordered them. This is something I’m doing on top of my normal duties as the lead artist, so please be patient as I send them out a little at a time. In other news, a light has appeared at the end of the tunnel, and we are finally clawing our way out of the character animation phase. You will have lots of options for character customization, and the town will be populated by randomized NPCs. Here’s a work-in-progress preview of what we’ve done so far:
We’ve still got a long way to go before all of this is finished, but we’re getting closer to a beta release, which backers will have access to. In the mean time, we’re moving on to monsters!
-Severin  Hello! This is Severin, checking in with progress from Dungeon Panic. We’re currently digging our way through character animation, a process accurately depicted by Default Dude above. Thousands of precautions have been taken to keep this complicated process organized and efficient. At this point I’m seeing pixels in my SLEEP.
The weird creature above is a monster known as a Dragling! Dragling is big, but he’s not quite a dragon. He waddles around dungeons, bashing things with his head whenever the mood fits him, which is often. The animation for Dragling was done by the multi-faceted Matt Bixler! 
Octavio requested I draw his OCs as character classes from the game, and they came out pretty cute! Hehe, 6 Dungeon Panic commissions finished, 4 to go… Status Update 2013/03/01Good day, followers and backers alike! Developer John here for another progress update. Last time I showed you a little of what was cooking with the Auroran Overworld. We’ve added quite a bit of polish since then, and found just the right tune for the generator. The world looks quite excellent now and as ever will be different for everyone who plays.
The world will be quite large too, giving us plenty of opportunity to fill it with Stuff as time goes on. And even in the wilderness things won’t be boring by any means; time passes, day turns to evening and then night. You might find something hidden away in a deep forest, and you may just find that things aren’t as safe above-ground as you might expect… Not everything is Out There, though! While the Town might not be as mortally dangerous as the wilds, there will be plenty to explore and experience at home. We’ve been designing and creating a bevy of domiciles and storefronts and all the little embellishments that really make a place come alive.
Right now we have a Game. Town, Overworld, and Dungeons. It’s early days yet, though. The amazing success of the Kickstarter has fueled us to fill the initial release with as much awesome as we can and still produce a product in a reasonable amount of time. We’re chugging away at it! We’ll keep updating as we get further and further. Who likes techincals? I love technicals, so my last offering in this update is a little bit about how we’re doing character customization. While enemies and Special NPCs have one fixed set of animations, the player and generated party members are done a little differently.
The final image here is our Default Test Guy sprite sheet. We’re using it to debug and fine-tune the palette-swapping mechanism and character drawing. Each character is built up from individual pieces and then each piece is color-mapped when rendering. The character sprites you see on the world and town screens above are rendered from these pieces and the GPU does the color-correction. The player will be able to create a character from a myriad selection of pieces and colors, and NPCs are generated randomly in the same way. Neat, eh? See you next time!  MORE POWER! This was commissioned by my buddy and roommate Charles Whittington, who draws the webcomic More Power. More Power is a comic for people who like motorcycles, racing, motorcycle racing, and Tim Allen. It’s written by my other good buddy Casey Mitchem, the Idea Machine. This is commission number 4 of 10! If you’re still waiting on a commission from me, thank you for the patience, I’m moving as quickly as I can without sacrificing quality. More to come! Hello Dear Followers! These past many weeks have been very quiet on the development front because we have been, well, developing! Things are progressing as these things do; fortunes and setbacks abound. Some of those setbacks can be interesting, though, and we thought you’d like to see one of our fun bugs. This week I’ve been working on the overworld generator, which involves a lot of tweaking and tuning. One experiment resulted in the first picture you see above. Where’s all the grass? It’s a forested land of trees, rocks, and pools. Traversable, but not really what we’re going for. Still, I quite like it, and it’s been a while since we’ve shared anything in-game. The second image shows more what things will look like, for comparison. The land is just filled with dungeons to be found, somewhere out there! Do keep in mind that these are in-development screenshots! We’re still working out the design of things, especially UI, and there are glitches and imperfections that will absolutely get stomped out in the days between now and release. That said, expect more from us as we get closer and closer to a finished product. Till next time! -Developer John  Presenting the next commission: Cobra and Lady Armaroid! I had to draw Lady Armaroid punching someone, because she got to do so little of that in the manga. Seriously, invulnerable kung fu robots shouldn’t spend all their time on the spaceship making sandwiches. If you haven’t read Cobra, it’s an old manga worth checking out if you like weird aliens and lots of action. -Severin  Re-introducing Volt, Fahrenheit, and the Countess! I’ve been toying with the style, trying to strike a balance between what looks good and what meets the functional requirements of the game. There are still a lot of questions to be answered in terms of how the game will look, but we’re working our way through them each day. Last week the prints arrived (they look great!) and this week I will be ordering the stickers, so expect those in the near future! -Severin  This is the first of the commissions, completed for Cho Amador! I met Cho in the trenches of Access Control, staffing for Anime Expo two years ago. My legs are still sore from patrolling the hallways. -Sev  NOW PLAYING - the Dungeon Panic backer comic! As y’all may recall, all backers get access to this, even the ones who pledged a buck! Right now we’ll be finishing and posting a page weekly as a series of Backer-only Kickstarter updates, located right over here. Once it’s over, we’ll create a PDF version and send a link in a message to all the backers. Since we promised an extra page for every $500 pledged after the goal, the total size of the comic will be 20 pages! This means that with the deadlines we’ve made, the game should be out before the comic ends. If you’d like to see the comic, but didn’t get a chance to back the project, we’re considering a few things, like making the PDF available for a few bucks on Gumroad once it’s done and selling print versions at cons. Hope everyone had a good holiday. We’ll be back pretty soon!  Hello everybody! The holiday rush is starting to die down and work is beginning to pick back up. We’ll have more to say in the very near future, and of course surveys and such for our Kickstarter backers. I just thought I’d give a little Friday update. Our iOS development hardware is just about here. We won’t be able to dig right into it, of course, but we will be able to get thing set up and work on it piecemeal over the coming months. After the Android/OUYA release, we’ll focus on iOS in earnest. Speaking of the OUYA, that photo? That’s the OUYA launcher software running on my Nexus 7. Our dev hardware has shipped, and the software dev kit has already landed. I’m spending a little time today getting my hands dirty with it. It’s very exciting. That’s about it for today. We’re already seeing the results of the Kickstarter campaign, and we’re in for a pretty wild couple of months once full production ramps up next week. Stay tuned! -Developer John  -art by Severin So this was my second Kickstarter project. The first one was created simply to make a set of books for my webcomic. That one did well, and I was quite happy with it. But the results of this one have rather stunned me! Over 800 people? That’s a lot of people! And what’s more, a good 2/5ths of the backing have come from within Kickstarter, so many backers were people who just heard about us! It’s real flattering to receive such a show of faith from people of all walks of life. It also goes to show what a different beast the game industry is compared to comics, and it’s really exciting to see. Webcomics are very much a part of this life, and I’ll always be doing them, but I’m really looking forward to joining the videogame world. And I’m looking forward to seeing what John and Severin and the rest of the team can do. THANK YOU, EVERYBODY! Of course, we’ll keep on posting here to let you all know how things go. Devkits have been ordered, diagrams drawn, and we’re ready to go full-time on this for the beginning of 2013! Onward! -Josh L, Dec 21 |
