Long-Term Planning (TL;DR)

So, alright. Maybe this won't end up being a strict weekly update, down to the day.

Last night, Joe and I hammered out a lot of timeframes on VersionOne for when we need to see art assets coming in. Right now, we're planned up through May 2012. It seems like we're looking forward too much, but I think we're being fair, considering the amount of the game we'd like to see mostly functional by then.

We've decided that come the end of May, we'd like to see the first 5ish hours of play in the game to be mostly, if not totally functional. This means, complete with all battle assets, environment assets, character art, text/dialogue, music, sound, and programming with the battle system/levelling system, along with the above content's implementation into RPG Maker. Since this is under a year away, this seems a bit hectic for our first goal, especially because this project is a "free-time," unpaid project for all of us right now.

That being said, I think our views are realistic and feasible. Much of this goal will help us out with the rest of the game; the battle system and several other functionalities will last throughout the whole game. We should have something visual to show for our current "tl;dr" status, soon.

If you're reading this, thanks for keeping up on our progress.

9 Years Later

I guess we are on level 2 of writing blog posts, but this is level 1 for me.

This past week Ryan and I have made a lot of progress on the high-level Spirits story. We compiled a list of major events that needed to happen between the start of the game and the final boss, and literally sticky noted them all around the room. The work we did is reflected in a document we put on Dropbox.

The story is very clean right now, but there are parts of it that need a lot more flushing out. One of the biggest problems we are having is trying to integrate adult forms of the characters into the game. We do think it would be awesome for the player to feel the progression of the adventure by giving them adult character art, so this is something we want to integrate. Here are a few things we have decided... or vetoed:

• We do not want adult character art to be tacked on. "Hey Caden! You lost a lot of your hair moving from one screen to the next."
• We do not want a "9 years later" to appear on the screen. There is absolutely no point.
• We are not against time-travel, but it should be done right. Time-travel is not a theme in Spirits. I personally would like to avoid the complications of it.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?

Also, Jenni, Ryan, and I all met in person for the first time yesterday. I think it was great for some of our team to meet, and I want to try to do this as often as possible.

The Ball Has Begun to Roll!

So as of today, we've got seven (Count 'em, seven!) people officially interested in joining the team/working on this game with us!

So far, Joe and I have been working on a lot of the technical aspects of the game, including battle abilities, weapons, anything to do with numbers, really.

We have one person who will be working with the battle system and mechanics, and we've got three to five interested artists - this is great, because this game will likely be very art-intensive.

Everything is chugging along, and Joe got a lot of work done over the weekend on the Battle Doc. I think we're ready to start stitching some assets together as soon as we get some!

That's all for now! More to come as soon as we have something we can show!