Blistering Beach preview #1

 Hello all!

I appologize for the lateness of this, not that anyone is waiting with baited breath for these, but I got a new work laptop for modeling while away from home and while that has been helpful in speeding up the process of creation, it has had a bit of a learning curve. I suppose that I am saying that I blame the laptop for the lateness of this, which is absurd, but here we are.

Alliteration plays a large role in the naming conventions for levels in ASU, to be honest, that's where most of the ideas for levels comes from. I take a place that one could find in another video game, like the ocean, and then play with alliteration until I come up with something that both includes the original idea and satisfies my annoying desire for the name to only start with one letter. Anywho, that's how we arrived at Blistering Beach. 

The original idea was a level that took place both above and below water level. 

Below water level

Above water level

The above and below sections will serve different functions for traversing the level itself. With underwater being the main area that you'll spend your time in, whereas above water will function as a way to scout ahead, along with find different treasures and whatnot above the waves. 

All the creature designs, as one would expect, are based around underwater creatures, but with the Saren Glass mutation twist that you've come to expect from the likes of the hawog or hanged acacia. 

I'm still working out the idea of this dang blog, but I'll get it one of these days. I suppose I could post it as a companion to my Steam updates, but, we'll figure it out. 

In any case, this was a short-ish one, but here we are!

Until next time,

-Lucas

Project Director

A Storm Unsung #2

 Hello all!

Since this is a development blog, I figured this next post, with a very creative name, would go over some in-development screenshots that have been taken and I could talk a bit about them and whatnot. I'm still not sure what I'm going to be talking about here, so, bear with me. 

This is the very first screenshot I could find of ASU. It was a bit of a teaser, I believe, for my wife. Because I was talking about showing off the bush there in the front, which some of you may or may not recognize as one that was used in Wind Carrier, but as the eagle-eyed among you can see, there is our first character there, Whispering Willow, hiding out in the grasses that would end up making up the Into the Rushes event in the Putrid Plains.

Next up, we have the very first iteration of our dungeon system. Well, you know what I mean. Originally, there were going to be objects blocking each ending of a tile, denoted by the garishly colored rocks there, but I opted for leaving them open ended and added a bit of a rounding to the edges instead. I believe it's good for looking out over the horizon. But, yeah.

For those of you who don't know, ASU uses dungeon tiles, basically large mini-sections of an area and weaves them together randomly to create unique dungeon experiences each time you go through a run. 

These screenshots are raw, as I'm sure you can see. But, this is the first screenshot of the dungeon system working with actual tiles. I think this also incorporates the cap tiles as well, which are like normal tiles, but only have one entrance to the tile, instead of four, and they end up as the 'caps' of certain other tiles. Not all tiles exits will have caps, but, yeah, more variety, I believe, was the idea that I was going for with that one. 

Variety is the name of the game in ASU, with each dungeon having unique: enemies, traps, events, and tiles. I'm a sucker for variety in my games, and that's why ASU has so much of it. 

Here we've got Tabitha the Phoenix fighting an in-progress Overgrown Sentinel. The Sentinel is the first boss that you'll encounter in ASU, not necessarily the first in any given run, but he was an important step. Especially since I can't just make things that deal damage, they have to do other things to keep it interesting. 

For example, the Overgrown Sentinel deals large amounts of damage with that breath attack there, but also summons permanent traps along the path that the breath takes. 

But, yeah, you can see the in-progress UI there as well, along with a name above Tabitha's head. There was a moment in time when I was considering making ASU multiplayer, but I ultimately decided against it, thus the names were removed. 

This is the first pass of the character changing widget from the inn. The format has remained, essentially, unchanged, but the proportions and the general in-progressness of it have been improved. 

For frame of reference, this is the current widget. Now that I look at it, I may want to make it larger to hide the other character names there in the back so it's less distracting. Anywho!

And here we've got the first iteration of the inn! Which also is largely unchanged. Got Tabitha there as the innkeeper, not that she'd make a good one. But, it stayed this way for a very long time. It wasn't until relatively recently that the innkeeper became her own character and the inn itself was populated a bit. 

And there it is as of now. Still not thrilling, but I feel like it looks a bit better. Y'know, I feel like I could stand to add more decorations, probably in general, to all of ASU. I'm going to write that down: 'Decoration Pass.' Something that I need to do once we're getting closer to full release, I think. 

In any case, that's all I have to share today, so I hope you enjoyed our little trip down memory lane. Next week, I'll probably be talking about upcoming things, like the next level that will be released, the Blistering Beach. 

Until next time,

-Lucas

Project Director

A Storm Unsung

Hello all!

Been a bit since I've posted anything here. I am here today to talk about our new, current project, A Storm Unsung, ASU for short. If you are interested in what happened with Wind Carrier, I will be adding a section near the end of this post for that. 

A Storm Unsung

ASU is an action rogue-lite game in which you play as different characters that are all distantly related by blood. Levels are generated procedurally from sets of 'tiles' and all the action is directed by a bot that I have named Glass's Eyes. 

Glass's Eyes chooses which tiles to spawn and where, what enemies, events, and traps as well. All of this is determined by various parameters that run the gamut from the player's current vital statistics to the amount of time that you have spent in any given level, with, of course, random added to the top for a nice seasoning. 

All the characters feature different strengths and weaknesses. They all have unique abilities which can be upgraded in various ways, some of which can vastly alter the way that certain characters can function. 

ASU features four difficulty settings along with infinitely scaling +1 levels called hymns. The difficulty system doesn't simply affect the stats of the enemies either. It changes everything from which abilities are available to certain enemies to trap density to spawn timers for events. 

ASU has been in development since, wow, the end of 2020, as it turns out. I had no idea that it had been that long. I suppose that means ASU has been in development for 4 years, but as most of 2022 and 2023 were a wash for personal reasons (in the span of two years, my father, grandmother, and dog all passed away), I will say 2 and a half years. In any case, the tentative plan is to have ASU finished here in the next year to a year and a half. It's mostly adding levels and all the things that go with them - enemies, traps, events, bosses, etc. 

But, yeah, I'm uncertain why I decided now to start blogging about it, it's on Steam and everything at this point, but maybe part of me was worried about it ending up like Wind Carrier did and I didn't want any one to be disappointed again if it were to end that way. I can say with as much certainty as I can that it will not, however, and it will be completed in a timely fashion. 

I'll be updating links and whatnot as time goes on - I kinda need to relearn blogger. I will likely be posting here most Sundays. I'm not 100% sure what I will be discussing, but I find that Steam updates don't really feel like they are the best places to discuss some things at length. Any who, yeah. 

Wind Carrier

Wind Carrier has been shelved, as I'm sure you all have figured out by now, assuming there are any of you left reading this. I realized at some point in 2019 that Wind Carrier was going to take me a ridiculous amount of time, some 10 years by my estimation, to finish. I would like to return to it, or, really, something like it. ASU was supposed to be a quick project, a kind of a pallet cleanser, but we see how that turned out. It seems I am incapable of simple, but I suppose that's why people enjoy the things that I do - I put everything I have into projects that I make, even if it's not the wisest thing to do.

Anyway, the realization that Wind Carrier was going to take some much time crushed my spirit and in some way made me lose interest in game making as a whole. In fact, it was about a year and a half after the shelving of Wind Carrier that I started working on ASU. ASU has blossomed into something that I can say that I am proud of, even if it's not really anything like Wind Carrier at all. They're set in the same world, as everything that I do is going to be, but at different times, of course. I'm rambling and losing the point besides.

I apologize for not posting an update about the shelving. It was wrong of me and I deeply regret that. There were actually a few of you who reached out to me, some years late, wondering about Wind Carrier's fate and for that as well, I am deeply sorry. I should have treated you all better. 

Until next time,

-Lucas

Project Director