Hello everyone, hope your new years are off to a great start! It’s been a while since our last update, and we’ve been hard at work on lots of tough areas since then. Here’s the rundown:

Art

Environments are continuing to come together. Since the last update, we created over 150 assets for our towns’ exteriors alone to ensure we have varied environments throughout the game. These assets are created in a modular format so we can create visually distinct structures efficiently:

We ran into lots of challenges getting rotated buildings to work with our grid. These took some time to sort out, but I think we’ve come up with a solution that works. Here are a few samples of our latest environments:

I’ve been continuing to refine our process for creating levels and making lots of improvements to our editing tools. For anyone interested, I’ll try to put together another “how its made” video as soon as I can find some time.

Sound

Aakaash’s awesome work on our soundtrack continues. Here’s a sample of his latest!

https://soundcloud.com/aakaash-rao/cobblestone-tale

Development

Apart from streamlining our level editing tools, my development focus in the last two months has been in two areas: cutscenes and combat.

Since the story will play an important part in the game, the ability to quickly generate precisely timed cutscene events directly from gameplay is critical. Before our Unity port, cutscenes needed to be timed and scripted by hand, which was complex and time consuming. This time around, I’ve implemented a visual editing tool which I’m extending to support the many custom events we’ll need. Here’s a shot of what it looks like in action:

Using the timeline (top), I can visually edit complex events with multiple characters acting simultaneously while previewing them in our editor (bottom), all without having to synchronize the actions in code. This will vastly accelerate development in the coming months as we implement the game’s story elements.

My second focus has been on implementing the core aspects of the combat engine. Things are still very early, but over the last few weeks I’ve gotten core features like the combat grid, player input, movement, animation, and basic AI in place. Here’s a quick preview of the combat engine running along with some of the other above mentioned features:

The ability to make real-time adjustments to combat parameters is a huge upgrade, since it’ll allow me to quickly try out new ideas and better balance the game.

So that’s the recap. Things were very much WIP in the last few weeks as we moved past some of the biggest pre-production hurdles I expect we’ll face (hence the delay). Thanks for sticking with us.

Time to go try The Banner Saga. Can’t wait, been waiting all week