Time Flies, Bogged Down

So, basically, the UI looks a bit better, but is still far from final. It should be alright for a video, but our main focus right now is actually single player.

We pushed out a few pre-alpha builds months ago that were exceptionally early and more or less didn't work at all unless you had a few friends to play with, knowledge of port forwarded, and enough time on your hands to figure out what all of the spells did, and in that time we've gotten more spells, an absurd number of bug fixes, and a few more levels to play with, but we haven't made the game any easier for individuals to pick up.

So I've been doing some massive RnD on that - Most likely, the single player will play something like a side scrolling beat em up, but that could change as we go along.

Laws of Nature

I find worldbuilding to be the most difficult but also most interesting part of designing Spellbound.

Obviously if you are a wizard and can throw fire and lightning with a flick of your wrist, you are not bound by the rules of our own Earth. You might even define magic as a breaking of the laws of nature.

How can we apply that to the world that our wizards live in? If mana can exist in a tangible, liquid form, how does that affect life on whatever the heck planet this is?

In our very first level, we created some trees that have mana visibly flowing in and through their bark. Are these a unique variety of tree that soak up mana from their surroundings? Maybe they produce the mana instead. Maybe the mana is a corruption, a warping of the natural plant life. Perhaps all plants soak up mana instead of water and nutrients from soil and energy from sunlight.

These questions allow us to make a world wholly unlike the one we live on, but we also have to do it right. In a fast-paced game it might be hard for us to convey that trees thrive off of mana and do not need mundane forms of nutrition. We could then have trees growing up from solid rock, floating in midair, or hanging out in the middle of an ocean.

Or all of that might look like crap because a tree sitting on top of a rock just looks like we were lazy with our level design.

Creativity forces us to invent new forms of creativity.

- Daniel

Flash can be kind of hard

So basically, most of this week has been spent on the UI work (with a tiny bit of spell work) and it turns out it is really easy to do things wrong. Over the next few days, I'll likely have the UI and menus redone, but it's taken over a week just to get reaquainted with flash and the UI code in general. Ideally, this new version will be much closer to how it'll look when it's done, layout wise, though I'm not sure the actual images will be their final versions. The icons are still 75% placeholder for right now.

Also, 9 slice scaling. Knowing about its existence a week ago would have saved quite some time.

-Blake

Wagon before the horse

One of the major complaints we've gotten in the past is to do with our UI which, despite a few changes here and there, has by and large just been there so we could playtest everything else we were doing. As I went to make a video last week, I watched through some of the footage I had and our placeholder UI even rubbed me the wrong way, so I decided to do some basic art for it before we put out an official "back on the wagon" sort of video. We're still going to aim for text updates to ramp up to 1-3 per week, but the first video is going to have to wait until our basic HUD looks presentable.

Once that's sorted, we're going to have a lot of things to show off in videos, so look forward to that.

-Blake

Climbing Back on the Wagon

So, when we missed our kickstarter goal, things had to shift around, priorities had to change, and Spellbound had to take a backseat to a lot of other things going on. Now, that's not to say we haven't made any progress in the past few months; we just haven't really had time to share any of that with anyone.

With the new year a few months underway, we decided to get back on the wagon as far as updates on the website and the like. We've got some solid progress on new levels and spells to show off in the coming weeks. We'll be spending this week working on cleaning things up and making them presentable for a video hopefully sometime early next week.