Adventures in game development continue! Time for another monthly report!!
For the VLOG version, please click below!
Going into August on the verge of iOS port release, we found ourselves re-evaluating some of the major glitches that seemed to plague the release. Things which we really couldn't easily resolve without Strikeworks doing a major overhaul of Tyrano. Which, we knew wasn't going to come.
If anything we learned mostly that Apple keeps their platform much tidier than Android by a long shot. The positives and negatives of their walled garden. To which we found ourselves sitting in limbo while Apple engineers took time looking over Dust and Air. Which is interesting to us because Steam approval is basically whether or not your app even loads, Android it's all automated and can be worked around to some degree. Our first response from Apple is a "we need more time to evaluate," implies a lot of things.
As it sits the iOS app is becoming the foundation for a full revision of our mobile platform. The center of which is stemming around the new UI elements:
To deal with the biggest issue of the buttons on the UI frame having issues, Chris offered the idea of simply removing them. They are necessary for PC but, phone platforms is a bit redundant if we have functionality built into the swipe abilities, as well as the menu button.
Thus began our final revisions before putting it forward to Apple. We're hopeful they'll review and find it acceptable for iOS. However, if not, we'll have to shoot all this to Strikeworks because literally we've done all that we can to resolve issues the engine has created. Will post more when we know.
That said, art development was on a roll in the month of August with characters and backgrounds churning out.
We're happy to announce that, Heather, one of our biggest supporting cast members for Raven's Prayer, is now completed in model.
While we don't want to spoil too much about her, she is a maid in the Wrenfell household who is close to Gwynevere. Her role will be visible throughout the story so completing her model is something that will greatly help future chapters.
Heather's development has been one that stems deep into the early development days of the project. She is actually the first direct homage character we've done for the story that is based on a real life person.
The real person, pictured to the right here, inadvertently had great influence upon the
project before it ever was conceived. She was merely a low level supervisor at a workplace whom was treated poorly by management. However, she went above and beyond for all the employees and was respected by many even after she moved on in life.
She'd never ask anyone to do something she wasn't willing to do herself. Despite her diminished stature under 5ft tall, she worked harder than anyone else. All of this left a lasting impact on the Broken Hammer members who worked under her. Whether she ever knows it or not, her impact will be remembered.
This was very much a prototype for characters to come as many story arcs will have similar homage characters. Their stories will be included in future credits sequences. Although, not all will be revealed.
Then lastly, as we close, we also pitched Winks with a task of prepping our major key images. She's actually done some for the Cathedral Arc before so this wasn't an entirely different kind of task. However, for Raven's Prayer, Georgy is definitely taking the lead on things when it comes to art style for the bigger key images.
The task we pitched for Winks was to help concept the images while Georgy has been working on backgrounds and models. We're happy to say she did spectacularly. Georgy was quite surprised with the results and extremely grateful for the help. Granted we can't share them all but, we will share one in closing here.
So till next time, see you in the skies!
