Combat & Conversation

[youngneil1]

Amazing progress there, Zach . The switch to adding more colours pays off big time - it all looks so vivid and detailed! The new tress are wonderfully crooked and organic, you really got the hand of a talented painter.

Purple ground tiles are hard to imagine right now. In select especially mysterious areas this could work out great - across the whole gameworld it might be a bit too much of an otherworldly distraction (or maybe not, hard to tell).

Keep us in the loop, please, it's great to see how it all comes together. And good recovery from the eye infection!

[zach_holbrook]

Thanks Karl! I've been experimenting with some purplish (but not totally purple) tiles -- I'll post them when I have a full area built with them. I definitely agree I don't want it to look too colorful/bizarre -- and so I fear I might have erred in the opposite direction and made the difference between them and my normal tiles too subtle.

I've spent the last two weekends doing some necessary family-related travel, but I'm still plugging away.

I've put in a little time with that big tile I mentioned and finally finished it. See below. It's too small/low-res to see -- there's a closeup in-game which makes it clearer -- but each of the clusters of grapes is actually a cluster of birds' heads, and the leaves on some of the clusters are wings (some of which flap). What's here is actually an amalgam of both tiles and animated props!

beautytree.png (971.81 KiB) Viewed 3120 times

[youngneil1]

Mind blown here , that's simply amazing! Such love for the details and the whole idea is very imaginative. Furthermore, I will love to see the animations in action. Using props to to create animated parts /sections of a larger tile is a very clever thing to do.

[slowdive]

That sounds so cool! Look forward to seeing it in it full intended and animated state.

[zach_holbrook]

Thanks guys. More soon...

[zach_holbrook]

I had a lot of grading to do over the last two weeks, but I'm through with it for a spell. Meanwhile, I've been *writing* a lot. One of the frustrations about writing for games is that revision is a million times harder-- at least once something is in the game, and especially if you need to add or subtract huge swaths of it. I've had both issues keep me from producing as much writing as I need to for Malkin. So I decided to write and revise in a word processor/Google sheets *until I'm absolutely satisfied with it* and only then incorporate it . It's been a revelation. Benefits:

I've produced more writing over the last month than I did over the previous five!
I can find inconsistencies more easily and structure plots better
I can write whenever

The only con is that I'll have to do a lot of copy/pasting.

But now I can say safely say that about 2/3 of the critical path is completely written.

[slowdive]

That sounds like a slick and efficient way to write... note we need an automated way to bring it in to the game with one click

[youngneil1]

Ah, I miss writing stuff. Being able to quickly and repeatedly read through own text for cohesiveness sounds very imporant indeed. On-click-imprting would be wonderful, but I guess it would require a very specific way of formating a word text (eg for dialogue logic/branches).

[zach_holbrook]

Happy holidays everyone. I've made a trailer for Malkin with a release date (sort of) attached to the end. I'm aiming for it!

There's a new song too.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

[youngneil1]

Loving it, Zach - many thanks for sharing!

It's very atmospheric, especially due to the dramatic and otherworldy music. The "Congress of Moths" is a fantastic idea - it's orginal and conjures some disugsting images immediately, yet rises also questions about how a "congress" of moths/around the theme of moths is formed and operated. Everything seems very fresh and off the beaten path of typical fantasy tropes. The graphics are very stylish, especially the wolf tree and the way you handle the dark areas struck me this time. Music and the text passages inbetween the gameplay footage also reminded me in a very positive way of the old movies form the 1920ies or something, which did show explanatory texts inbetween the shots and made use of orchestral music. Adds a nostgalic vibe to the otherworldly.

Can't wait for Fall 2020 to come ...