Way Back Machine

Hello, friends.

Hope you are staying safe. And healthy. And sane.

Take care of each other.

Today, I thought it might be fun to do a retrospective and see how things have changed from early prototypes to the current build, to get a sense for how far we've come just in terms of visuals.

To start, let's look at the dungeon interface. (most of these early shots are from 2018)

The main difference here is in the tilesets for dungeon maps. Early on, I used simple rough cuts that I made in MS Paint. Since then, I've tried a couple of different map making tools to help me churn these out at a reasonable level of quality, finally settling on Dungeon Painter Studio, which was a gift from my sister.

There are now over a hundred of these tiles in the project, but there are still a lot left to do.

Next, let's look at events.

First, you'll see that we have some real art to show here, instead of whatever that was I borrowed from the internet originally. You'll also see some attention to detail with borders in the current version, and I now render the options in multiple columns with context-relevant icons. There's still some work I intend to do here with sizing and layout, but we're getting close.

You might notice that the font size increased between these two versions. I'm probably going to increase it again before release. It never seems to get big enough.

Now for the character sheet.

Most of the changes here are stylistic. My concept for this view hasn't changed much, but you can now see an indicator for morale, plus some information about faith over to the right. I'm planning to get some proper sigils for the different faiths to make those stand out better. And the devotion score needs to have some kind of indication of how high “2.5” is. Maybe a brightening star or something…

Here, again, I might need to puff up the font sizes some more.

Next, overland…

Art. And location icons. And what is that up north? Tunnels?

Yes, Wathi tunnels.

Finally, I leave you with... COMBAT!

The combat engine is where I started all of my development. It is from those very humble beginnings that I got the idea I could make a whole game. I needed help. Fortunately, I found a bunch of cool artists to make this actually come together. The forest scene is still a work in progress, but damn, look at that. This is better than I originally planned for things to be.

The march continues.