It’s leap day and I probably haven’t gotten as much as I wanted done. I suppose you can chalk it up to artistic integrity, still I’m only a hop skip and a jump away before leaping into trailer grounds.

While the game is in its final paces (from a Wendell standpoint), much of the graphics work is preventing me from showing anything, namely the illusive Felix model itself. The move into 3D has put me into a weird position because I have to design the character well enough to work in 3D and once my design became questionable it’s been a nightmare ever since.

Although, the game mostly takes place in a 2Dish view, I’ll actually be using a variety of camera angles. Even if I wasn’t I wouldn’t want to have to make drastic changes at some point in the future.

Business will leap forward once I get this model right. the hardest thing about anything artistic is that you can’t control when you’re done with it. And even when you think you’re done you can wake up the next day and not like what you did.

This model is especially important because I don’t want to end up hating it like I did with Tale of the Night, in addition, I’m actually expecting this to be considered the “first” game and the model I launch with will likely be the one that speaks for every game afterwards (provided there are sequels of course).

I thought I was going to have the model done this week. Wrong! It’s driving me nuts! I promised I wouldn’t end up whining about in a long winded post so I’ll move on to something else. It’d be so nice if I could do something on time for a change.If I slow down, take a deep breath, and follow proper protocol (profile images) I’m sure It’ll turn out okay. The model is getting my complete attention so that is most certainly to be my next update.

I’ve also been playing around with the shader because it was very hard to to see the finer details of the model in-game, such as teeth due to the whites bending together. It’s not a hard problem to fix at all but I could easily kill a few hour experimenting with all the different lighting styles.

I’d hate to end another post empty-handed so here’s some concept art on a few features in the game. These are just a few of the obstacles that you will come across in the first chapter.

For starters, I’d like to apologize for the lack of media. It’s really been off my radar the past week.

On the other hand, I think this project has finally kicked into high gear. One of my biggest problems was setting up an event system that was flexible and could handle a variety of events and I’ve finally got around to doing that. A host of gameplay components rely on the system so the game just got much much simpler.

I’ll get back to modeling soon, in fact I’d say something should arise this week. Not too long after that I should be jumping into promotion mode. A trailer won’t be long after that. The game won’t be complete at the time of the trailer (I don’t think they usually are) but it should look like a full game. I’ll likely end up with two of them at least.

A trailer also means music, so I guess people will get the chance to finally hear what I’ve come up with. I’m doing my best to make sure I don’t overuse music again.

If anyone is wondering about that model, I’m still tweaking things a bit but it’s almost in presentable form. It’s not something I work on consistently but rather something I work on each day for a little while. There’s this one angle I don’t like and it’s driving me nuts.

On to other news! Today, I think I finally want to talk about how different this game is going to be. I’d be willing to say up to this point that each game was an upgrade from the last (with the exception of Samba of the Wolves and its Non-Linear level design) but this one feels like a new direction. I think I can finally call this one an Action-Adventure game. Here’s a list of things that have changed. I believe a lot of my goals have been accomplished.

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