World Building

This week has been a good one for Arnthak. Content wise, there's been some significant mapwork additions, as well as a changes to some interactions. Jay has sent on some new sprites, which are an excellent update of the old Slug sprites.

World Building

It's been a busy fortnight or so - Arnthak rumbles toward completion as always. The week after the last update was spent mostly solidifying Items, crafting and lore. This week's been a whirlwind of new content - Jay has sent me over three new sprite sets for creatures, so they've gone straight in. Additionally, I was inspired to work some new features in, and a huge amount of mapwork got done.

World Building

My day-job has wrapped up for the year, so I've spent a reasonable amount of time on Arnthak since last night. Mostly, I've been focussing on Items - it's a challenge to think of an item, then break it into components and think 'where should that come from?' - when you're trying to create plants/animals/etc instead of just pulling ISO Standard Fantasy items.

World Building

Arnthak's been growing and reshaping the last month, though it's been subtle, behind the scenes changes. I've been working on code to allow the player to store items within containers, which gives rise to some interesting potential. Additionally, I've been working on joining some map areas together, allowing traversal to various areas that though fleshed-out, weren't reachable at the time.

Mapwork

World Building

It's... been a month, and I've lost track of all the stuff that's been happening on Arnthak.

Quite a fair amount of time has been spent on sewing together the main plot - seeding Lore, working on dialogue, etc. It's actually weird that I feel very little sense of progress when working on these aspects. Working on the mapdata, which is tracked via the atlas, etc, feels far more concrete.

Regardless, here's a clock:

World Building

Unfortunately, I forgot to post up the video from last week, so here it is:

In the video, I basically just go over the last few weeks, so if you've read the last few posts you're already up to speed.

World expansions

Map work

Arnthak continues to grow, slowly (I've been taking a bit more personal downtime lately). Part of that progression was to stray from 'the block' of current work, and move down a bit. The smallest lake at the base of the Mountain has taken shape, and the nearby village has also begun to form. This makes me very, very happy as it allows me a bit of opportunity to form more 'feel'. I have also enjoyed the fact that Morrowind had many different cultures within one area - even so far as to have a village within the shell of a giant crab. Considering that the three villages (plus forest village of the Myconids) are so far from each other, it's not hard to believe they should feature some marked points of diversity. (even going so far, as to say they should be slightly ignorant of each other).

As a direct result of this line of logic, the village that I'm working on has an unusual design. The houses are bulbous, with stalks at the bottom. This is because the nearby lake may flood, and the houses are built to keep the inhabited area dry.

Click for detail

NPCs

The NPC roster grows slowly, but I'm very happy with the artwork involved.

Pixel Artist

So, something that comes about as exciting for me (personally) - I've just comissioned a set of sprites for Reclamation from a Pixel Artist. We'll begin with a single enemy to test the waters, but if the arrangement works well, I may look into more from the same guy.

What this presently means

Reclamation may have additional work by other people. This changes it from an 'I did this' project to a 'I did most of this, and managed others for the rest'. Resume-wise, I'm not sure which sounds better...

What this could mean

Addition to the Pixel Art gallery

Two more houses from the previous plot

As usual, the rest of the Pixel art is over here

I'll just leave this here...