Commission done by the artist @UltChimi on twitter. I'll soon be posting Solaris's design ref sheet when I finish it.
A commission that I recently had fufilled by an artist named Sylfeanee. They did a great job and I'm quite happy I finally have a visual reference for Bix. I will be making Solaris myself for his ref sheet due to the inscriptions that I wish to have on him. :)
As morning broke upon Appleby, the sun's light began to shine over the town, illuminating the ruined town with tents dotting it. The sounds of birds from the blacked trees began to permeate the landscape around them. A figure stirred from under their sheets as the light from the window lit up their room.
Eventually giving in, the lanky man from under the sheets stretched and got out of his bed. Yawning, he slipped on his worn slippers lying next to his bed. Walking over to the basin, perched upon the small table he splashed his face with the water within, drying off shortly after with a small towel. Barely clothed, wearing only his undergarments he paused then quickly splashed his pits, shaking quickly after. Nearly finished, he walked over to the small dresser to grab some clothes to put on.
Opening it up his small, yet neat collection of clothes was presented. Some shirts and pants folded in the small shelves and a dark blue robe hung inside. He quickly dressed himself with a shirt, pants, and the robe, shortly after putting on a pair of well polished shoes. Just as he was about to exit his room, he paused to realize he was missing something. Quickly turning about to pick up the book lying on his bed, then exiting the room.
Hello, time for a status update and a bit of a info dump of what's been happening with me for the last 8ish months.
Hey all again, apologies for not posting something earlier but I'll quickly go over what I've recently been doing. If its not really obvious, I try to post once a month with something, but the last 3ish months I've been very much so leaving my blog on the side.
Gamedev has really ballooned in its time I usually spend on it. I am also heading the two locations where we post stuff related to our game for people to get to see, both on our tumblr and twitter which helps divert my time even more. Right now development of our "Bird Game" is pretty full force, we've recruited someone who will be helping us with the sound side of stuff and someone else who is helping by providing concept art for mainly me to turn into 3D models. Modeling itself takes a good amount of time, and I'm not just modeling but also doing ui and menus which exacerbate the work required on my end.
And we are beginning to wind down to when I promised to start work again on KCS. The time I gained by dropping it helped out quite a bit. Recently I've actually been getting into the business end of the little studio I'm a part of, setting up and LLC for it, getting all the required details to open a business account, and likely later this week paying someone more legally inclined to take a look over a contract that I drafted for our expected contractor(s).
I did most of this "myself" with help from some people that were happy to provide a helping hand getting to know what I needed to do for many of my required steps. Thinking back on it, while I certainly think that it was a bit difficult it would be much easier if I needed to do it again. As the majority of the difficulty came from my inexperience doing it. I know right, what a surprise.
So how are the other projects I'm working on going then?
One of the earlier things I worked on as a part of Banished Crown was a game called Just Dig It.
Currently this game is restricted, as it really isn't in any sort of good state for showing.
Quick update as well, the expansion for Rogue's First Heist has been canceled. The majority of the reason coming down to difficulties with the navmesh for the game. This game however is still available in its post jam state.
Anyway, Just Dig it.
Hello all, so just recently the 3rd chapter for Kobold Cursed Sword dropped. This time the turnaround for the chapter was much quicker due to more focus on it along with a quicker turnaround by my editor.
Despite not having a concrete idea of an ending for this story I do plan on finishing it eventually, but right now I'm going to take a break to focus on other projects for about 3 months. I have 3 main projects that have been on the backburner for a while that need my attention. Those being the PMD Tabletop system I've been working on, the second being level design work for the game I helped make for a jam called Rogue's First Heist, and some cleanup on another game I helped make for a jam called Just Pong.
I've talked about RFH before but Just Pong is something that I've never mentioned here. A quickie for RFH is that you lead a Rogue to steal valuables by placing coins for them to follow. As mentioned prior we have a much more expansive spritesheet that we want to use to make a more expansive set of levels for play. Which might take quite a bit of effort but is what we are aiming to do.
Just Pong is a version of Pong with upgrades and idle gameplay. There's a bit of a story in there and whatnot but recently its been the game that has been getting the most attention of any of the games we've put out on itch.io under Banished Crown Studios. The majority of the work we are planning to do is mainly cleanup and polish to a complete, yet focused little idle game. Given the game's simplicity, shouldn't be too long of a process.
Last is the work on the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Tabletop system I mentioned. This has been mentioned as well before, but essentially its a rework of this system: link. I played this about a year ago and had a lot of homebrew that I made, even talking to the system's creator about the system. The whole thing struck me as a system with an intriguing core ruleset but lacked enough polish or balancing to use that core to its finest. My system that I've been working on quite a bit aims to fix many of the problems I faced when playing with the other system. Along with a more fleshed out content base I want to get it to a testable state to then test. Hopefully iterating on it until the final product is well polished and up to my standards before "publishing" it for players. I have no doubts that I will be unable to finish it given these three months, but hope to progress with it during the time after the prior two projects are finished.
Anyway, thanks for reading. My focus with this post is to be as transparent as possible to readers and people who enjoy my work. Thanks to everyone who has enjoyed my writing and I hope you all have a great day.
Oh! And I'll try to keep up with a post here a month in the meantime.