Hello, I am Founder and CEO of Broken Hammer Games. I'm also the lead writer and project manager on the Guns VN Project for All is Fair in Dust and Air. This update will be the first of many as this project now moves from the closed circle into the lime light.
While this may not be as flashy as the studio updates you might see from projects like Star Citizen, I will try to provide details on our development and progress we are making.
For starters, if you haven't seen it already, our UI went from concept to polish at the start of the month. Here's a picture:
It had been kept on the back burner for some time as we focused on characters, but then our lead artist had a stroke of inspiration and well, one thing led to another.
Part of the reason being is that our UI places William's sprite in it. So you can't work on one without thinking of the other.
While many VNs don't have the protagonist on screen ever other than key images, we've elected a different approach. This is going to help out later as some of the stories don't always have William in the first person. So for those we have the option of using a different headshot sprite set.
This is just another example of a methodology we've adopted from watching Star Citizen's development. We try not to hold artists back. There are tasks that need to be finished but if the artist is hitting a block, we change gears and work on something else on the list of tasks. As long as it doesn't hurt a deadline, the project moves forward.
Often times from my own experience on this project, this has really benefited our team as they will keep the original task in mind as they flow with inspiration on another. New ideas sink in and then when the other task comes up again, it gets done faster than it would have before.
January as a whole has seen a lot of these advances since shifting and getting the UI worked on. As it sits now we have enough done to start prepping our demo for testers.
Which we expect to open up for closed testing in February. This will be for the day one demo that covers the first day of the neutral arc.
The entire neutral arc covers about three and a half to four days. The main brunt of the writing on it has been completed. However, we are still making edits and slight revisions as we work.
That said, on the writing front, the neutral arc has actually grown slightly over the month of January thanks to some of those revisions. Speaking as the one handling the writing, it is certainly interesting to see how the story has gone from it's initial outline stages, to it's earliest draft, and finally to the state it is now.
Someday it will be fun to discuss with you about the revisions and what was changed and why. Some of the original team that worked on this might not recognize sections of the story, or may even be surprised how old segments have expanded and become richer. I hope they like the changes when they finally play it.
On that matter I am very much looking forward to getting it to testers.
February is going to be a busy month as we'll not only be launching that test but also quite a few other tasks on the schedule. To start off we will be holding our first major music meeting of the year. In which we'll be chatting with one of the original composers of the Guns of Icarus Online soundtrack. If you've played the game, you've heard some of his songs and probably not realized it!
It is exciting! For not only myself but for the team as we continue to break hammers and make this game a reality.
If you haven't already, check out Guns of Icarus Online! We'll see you in the skies!