July update

Hey guys.  Sorry for being absent most of this month.  A lot of serious real-life stuff's been going down and has been taking some time away from this project !  Not to worry, however, I still have my mind on it all the time, and give it some peeks and pokes whenever the opportunity strikes.

To hold everyone over for now, I thought I'd throw out some random screens, sketches, and ideas I've had over the last month or so.  Onward !

Unsorted concept sketches

Here's some stuff that I sketched up a few weeks ago.  Because of the spoiler risk, I'll forego the captions and let the pictures speak for themselves.  The style isn't a serious study but is meant to harken back to character designs of the late 1980s and early 1990s (as usual).  Enjoy :)

Video: Evolution of the HUD elements

Hello. This little post is basically to show off a few HUD elements, and hopefully I can expand upon it later. Making sure the player can access important stats quickly, with a single glance of the eye is very important when designing a HUD. Deciding which stats get prime real estate as permanent residents of the screen may seem straightforward, but believe it or not, there's even more limited space to place those elements than one would realize.  Furthermore, designing the elements to "pop" and be obvious to everyone is also a concern (and one which I can actually handle without having to hire an asset artist right away!).  So, for a little more insight (and a cute little video of our HUD in action), click onward....

Video: Hitboxes

More later....

The "Equip" Menu, pt. 1

As promised on our Twitter feed, some of the first real in-game menus are going to be shown in this article. I was hoping to finish more in the past couple days so that I could create a video out of it, but there wasn't really enough content to justify such a thing.  So instead, below the cut you'll get to see a whole bunch of early menu concept art, in addition to screenshots of the real thing.

Updates - March 9th

Hey guys, long time no see.  I just wanted to give everyone an update on what I've been working on the past couple weeks, for those of you who don't follow the Twitter feed.  For about a week, maybe a week and a half, I was working on a tool to create graphical fonts, which I was hoping I could use and re-use beyond FaeSaga.  That tool is publicly available here.

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I've also been experimenting with a pixel shader to create windows for the various menus we have to utilize in-game, which didn't work out quite as hot.  That code will probably need to be retooled.

Also, I made a little HSV color dialog to see if I could wrap my head around the math.  One of the things I always wanted to do when I was younger was to write a really nice drawing app -- That will probably have to wait until after this project gets published (and I get a few more releases under my belt), but still, it was good coding exercise.

Finally, I've put some work into some of the new critical tools in the tool chain.  This is the first screenshot of the Decorator.  It's pretty basic right now.  What it does is allows us to place sprites where we want on the map.  In the near future I  hope to be able to script certain parts of the scenery with this tool, specifically doors, stairs, and treasure chests.   I'm in the process of refactoring out old Events code from NBTE into this tool.  Speaking of NBTE...

Several important pieces of missing functionality have been added to NBTE, making it almost (but not quite) feature-complete.  What's been added was the ability to move and delete layers (requiring some array juggling internally), the Line, Ellipse, and Fill tools, full Movement Permissions mode, and limited Undo support.  Refactored out of the code was all Events handling.  The toolbox was also made resizeable, to accommodate for more tools in the future.  Preliminary Template support and Commandline support was also added, as well as the ability to associate (*.nbm) files from the shell. 

Moving forward, I will continue to work on the Decorator, as well as the Enemy Pattern Editor, which the decorator tool will serve as a code template for.  I don't plan on smoothing out the rough edges on the Decorator, as long as it will work in our big toolchain.  The reason for this is because I want to move onto finally getting some real map and sprite assets designed for the game.

Until next time...

Logo / Box Art concepts

You guys may have noticed the new header at the top of this blog. That's a bit of a prototype for the logo I'm hoping we'll be able to have commissioned for the game. I'm not that great at font metrics, but after several hours of tweaking and path-editing in Illustrator, I think I've got the vectors down to how I want it. All that's left would be to send it off to a pro to give it a nice paint-over so that it can be used in our promotional art, title screen, and etc.

And now for some fun stuff. Here are a few sketches I did starting from back in January coming up with the logo:

AutoTiles, pt. 1

Save for a bit of a graphics card issue I had yesterday, the past several days have been mostly about improving the coordinate system and putting features from the new collision system I demoed for you guys earlier back into the alpha. I've also been working on improving the map loader.

An interesting problem presented itself yesterday when beginning to implement AutoTiles into the alpha. I will explain after the cut.

Video: Ice

Collision Masking

Work continues on the alpha.  The built-in movement and collision routines with the main tool I'm using to develop FaeSaga in are a bit of a double-edged sword.  On one hand, it allows for rapid prototyping of what the game will sorta feel like when it is complete.  Collision detection can be powerful stuff, as it can handle per-pixel stuff automatically.  On the other hand, fine control of these routines often come with irritating caveats, or aren't available at all.  Therefore, I've spent most of today working on a replacement movement and collision routine for the main character.  (Video after the cut)

Game Mechanics and Compositing, pt. 1

So, I was plowing through some Lagoon yesterday (pic related), and playing through parts of it again reminded me of a couple of things that come to mind when I'm thinking through FaeSaga.

( Read More ) 

Dialog Mockups

Sometimes I can't decide on a damn thing.  Well, at least when it comes to tweaking the finer details.  These mockups show my decisions on how to create menus over time.

To your left is a very recent mockup.  There are more interesting screens after the cut.

( Read More )

The Toolchain

So, one of the things which I think will make it possible for us to easily extend FaeSaga and spin it into an even more expansive universe over time is the toolchain.  Many of the resources for FaeSaga are externalized to allow for resources to be readily swapped out and tested, and I have written a variety of tools to facilitate this process.

Here are some of the current tools being actively developed in FaeSaga's toolchain.
(Screenshots after the cut!)

Alpha

One of the reasons I'm posting today is because we marked Feb. 1st on our calender as "First Alpha Build" day. That means, no matter what, I was supposed to get some sort of a prototype ready to present for today. Well, after some setbacks, and a lot of caffeine, I'm pleased to say that we're well on our way towards that goal. What I have for you all today are some screenshots of the alpha in progress.

Now, let me first make the disclaimer that what you will be looking at is a work in development. (Actually, it's basically a bunch of art placeholders for the code I've been churning out here.) Most of the hard work over these past months is going on under the hood, and that will continue to be the case for quite a while, or at least until we start paying for some more replacement assets. All existing art assets you see in these screens belong to their original owners, and I won't claim any rights over anything I didn't make specifically for this game. Same goes for any music you might hear in any videos -- I'll try to give proper credit where I am able, and make sure all this stuff's in the realm of fair use.

Now, onto some screens !

First Post

Well, all blogs have to start somewhere, right? Nice to meet you all. I'm Nobu, the project lead for a game Subsoap is currently developing called FaeSaga. :)

What you are (hopefully) looking at right now is the development blog for our project. It is one of the first steps in the process of unveiling the existence of this project to the public. Development on the project itself has just begun, but I've been designing specifications for it for several months now. The team is small right now (and I can't introduce them all yet!), but I'd like to tell you the roles of the people currently on it. However, before that, I'd like to thank Andrew Sum for helping put this project on the right track when it first started, and some very useful advice thereafter. Thanks!

About Me -- There's probably a lot of you who have heard of me from projects I've done in the past, or possibly from some random thing you saw or heard on the internet. If you haven't, that's okay, because for this blog in particular you won't need to know any of that stuff. My job as project lead basically means that (as of right now, at least) I'm doing the majority of the development and coding for FaeSaga. Most of the game's design decisions, general art direction, initial testing, and such is what I'm supposed to be concentrating on. On top of those duties, I will also begin to blog publicly about my current work. I've also had past experience with composing music for games, as well as some general art interests, but for Subsoap, my primary function is to see FaeSaga gets made. Therefore, I will sometimes contribute some resources on the side which are related to the project, but won't be doing much (if any) of the art or music assets for the game.

Brian Kramer -- Brian's the brains and business end behind Subsoap, and also the Executive Producer of FaeSaga. Part of his job on the project is to make sure I do my job, and not to get too distracted from our long-term goals. He also pretty much bankrolls everything, and gets the final say on greenlighting any important financial decisions. Brian's also gonna be hopefully helping me translate my super geek-speak into more practical things when I get neck-deep into my coding work (ie: updating the blog when I'm indisposed, or adding posts to elaborate on game developments when my posts ramble on, or don't make sense).

James Aaron Christie -- James is working on the web back-end for the project, which I'm told is a very important thing.

Subsoap has some other members, but they're not involved with the project (yet!). I'm sure they'll introduce themselves when they're good and ready!

Stay tuned for more posts. I've got a lot to say, since we're just getting started :3