These past two weeks I’ve been mostly doing three things (related to this project. I’ve been doing quite a lot more than this, but this is what’s relevant…).
1) Cleaning up and organizing Codecks.
2) Planning out this first level more.
3) Modeling one of the characters for this first level.
Now to describe those in a little more detail.
As you may (or may not) know, we’ve been using Codecks (https://www.codecks.io/) to organize ourselves and manage this project. It’s an amazing tool, but it’s designed to be flexible, so you can use it in a number of different ways. Two weeks ago, Unity announced their “Open Game” project, which they just so happened to be using Codecks to help plan. Before this Codecks had been a fairly unheard-of platform, probably more well-known in Europe where they’re based, so it was cool to see them get some spotlight. Anyways, I was fascinated to see how Unity organized their Codecks project. I got so many ideas from them that I completely re-organized our own Codecks project. 🙂
As part of that, I went through and updated our Game Design documentation to be current with the direction we’re taking the game, as we hadn’t officially updated it in awhile. This required me to make some decisions about different aspects of the game design, and all-in-all, I think we have a much more solid, concise, and clear design.
I went through and laid out the flow for the first level, and the requirements, and content that needs to be created for it. I’m excited to have more of a plan. I like plans. One significant thing that changed is there will no longer be branching/converging questlines. We realized that with so much of the core of this game being story-driven, it just didn’t feel right to have the player skip whole sections of quest where characters were developed.
Speaking of developing characters. Meet Aelic. He’s an owl-bear gryphon, and the caretaker of the island on which the first level takes place. He’s not too happy about having to be awake during the day to make sure Voyagers-in-training don’t get up to mischief.
I’m still not completely happy with the colors/design, but it’s coming along! After a few more tweaks, it’s on to rigging and animating.
P.S. Join our Discord if you want to stay more involved: https://discord.gg/JEjteYe