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Aurion, legacy of the Kori-Odan by Kiro’o Games studio

Aurion, is an epic action RPG , set in a wonderful African Fantasy world, with a unique, open and dynamic fighting gameplay.

Epic and strategic Real-Time Fighting, Visual evolutive Combos !! 

Gather your Legacy ,merge the Aurions, to create new (21 aurionical transformations can be done !) 

Powerful duels with immersive fighting dialogues. 

Unique scenario & lots of powerful enemies and bosses.

Aurion, legacy of the Kori-Odan on Steam Greenlight / twitter / facebook

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Native to the Northwest Frontier: Interviewing DesertFox on ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’

Set during the oft-forgotten War of 1812, Over The Hills And Far Away is a stunning visual novel rich with an interactive environment and atmospheric soundtrack. This text-based video game will transport you back to America’s early history, dealing with the war within the scope of two very different characters on opposing sides of a larger conflict. What really caught me about this project was Mai (shown above), a young Native American from the Shawnee nation and one of the two main characters featured in the game. The story itself hinges on the developing respect and trust between Mai and William Aubrey, the British soldier seeking refuge in a world falling apart. It’s their story, one of changing perceptions and foregoing stereotypes, that really defines Over The Hills And Far Away as not only an intriguing gameplay experience, but also important to support.

Currently up on Kickstarter, the project has until May 1 to raise its funding goal. I strongly recommend you consider becoming a backer! The team also has a Facebook, Twitter, and website for you to check out in the meantime. Today, I’ll be sharing my interview with DesertFox, the lead developer on this project who was kind enough to answer my enthusiastic questions about the game.

Continue reading⇥

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Milestone 3 Video - Teaser Trailer

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Herald: An Interactive Period Drama About Colonialism

Herald is a two-part interactive period drama for PC, Mac and Linux that plays as a mix between a visual novel and a 3D point and click adventure game. You are Devan Rensburg, a man of mixed heritage, assigned to work as a steward aboard the merchant ship HLV Herald.  

As a steward, you are responsible for the well-being of all passengers on board, be they rich or poor, important or downtrodden. Your job is best done without anybody noticing, so if a conflict should arise, you are well-served to solve it before the captain gets wind of it.  

Which side of morality will you be on? Are you going to stand up for the oppressed, or will you help those in authority abuse their power? Either way, you are responsible for your choices, and you will carry the consequences.

Kickstarter

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This week Broken Age was released in full. It’s point-and-click adventure video game, where you progress by interacting with characters and use lateral thinking to solve story puzzles. It’s a favourite genre of mine because you get to feel clever as you enjoy a good story that unfolds at your own pace, and for the humour and depth of interaction it allows for. It was made by the people who did gems like Monkey Island, Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle and many more, so it’s no wonder that the Kickstarter to fund the project broke records. Double Fine’s long, hard journey to make and ship this game can be followed in the fascinating documentary series about it.

In the game you get to switch freely between two likable young teenage protagonists. There’s Vella,  a black girl who lives in a town of bakers in a world terrorised by monsters, except that over the years it’s become tradition to see it as an honour to be visited by the monster and have the chance to appease it, despite the terrible sacrifices, but Vella decides to fight back instead.

There’s a powerful feminist reading one can make here, and also generally of how systems of injustice can hold sway over people, trapping them into a perspective of “well, that’s how it’s always been done”, and how it can be internalised to the extent that the harm that comes from them can be ignored or rationalised, and the need to break that cycle.

Fulfilling the other side of the coin is the other protagonist, Shay, a white boy that has grown up on his own on a spaceship programmed to serve his every need and to coddle him. When the game begins, he’s grown tired of this and looks for a way to escape the system and make a real difference.

The narrative continues to explore the themes of personal fulfilment and unmasking systems of power with its protagonists and the NPCs. The protagonists reside in different worlds, but as  the player advances their storylines they can begin to see the connections between them and use that to get them to help each other out.

Broken Age has great twists, hilarious dialogue with brilliant voice-acting, funny and clever puzzles, so much charm, lovely characters, and looks and sounds absolutely beautiful with its painted imagery and orchestral score. And through it all, an excellent philosophy of what can be learnt from walking in another’s shoes.

Broken Age is available on GOG, Steam, Ouya, PS4 and Vita, IOS an Android.

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(I submit this for Costume Quest)

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if you need to waste a large amount of time and you find it satisfying to watch numbers slowly tick up, please play this game about kittens in a catnip forest

my cat civilization has been going for 27 years now. we have developed writing and have friendly trade relations with a caravan of lizards. i’m told you can achieve space travel at some point. it’s amazing.

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Hello Tumblr I am here.

So I am pretty busy with work (first full-time software engineering thing, woo) but I don’t want to abandon this blog entirely while I’m hiatused from my own projects. As such I’m going to try to at least do a weekly queue of links and such. If you have favorite development blogs, please link me, so I can get more material!

I may also link job postings from game companies from time to time, if anyone’s interested in that.

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Elsinore, or: my friends are making a game go look at it

So while I continuously fail to post to this blog because I have not been working on my games lately because Moving Is Hard, my friends are hard at work on their project, Elsinore! There are time loops, Shakespeare, murders, and neat-looking ladies. Go check it out!

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Things I keep forgetting to update: This blog!

I got a new job as a software engineer for a mobile gaming company which will remain nameless. I start that next month, so right now I'm very busy getting ready to move. I have been doing a little work on a Twine fan project lately, and I should be able to continue work on Project Punchdragon during my spare time after my job starts up.

But for now everything is moving, which is exciting and terrifying.

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A full color, updated design of Emmy from the project temporarily known as Punchdragon, since I need to work on her some more and also for a drawing challenge.

I will probably bring out the color of her headband and shoes more when putting her in the game-- as an ordinary student, she wears the drab uniform mandated by the city; her hairband and shoes provide a bit more individuality, as well as a highlight on the screen.

I updated her haircut, because I wanted to distinguish it from the dragon's haircut (which it was previously pretty similar to) and also because having it short and very thick will make it easier to model than long and wispy. 

I'm thinking her magic is going to be represented by geometric shapes appearing around her hands when she uses spells, but I'll have to see if that works well enough for telegraphing what's going on to the player once I have a model for her-- with the camera in third person view and her hands in front of her, the effects might not be visible enough.

This fills the protagonist requirement for the Character Drawcember challenge. I'll have to do a full-color art for Gabriel at some point, since he's the only one of the game's three protagonists that hasn't got official art yet, but that'll be outside the challenge.

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Slowly but surely, she's coming to life again. I'm partway through re-rigging her (and re-weight-painting everything gaaaaahhhhh), and have started work on retexturing as well (mostly on the face.) I'll be doing her animations concurrent to working on movement code in the game, to try and make the movement flow really well.

I am not going to be making promises regarding update frequency for a while because life keeps throwing things at me being like "hey catch" and my hand-eye coordination is awful and I drop things, but things are hopefully looking up? Maybe?

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I'll also be posting Twine games from time to time! Stay tuned.

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I haven't been updating much! I was all set to have a really productive week, and then I had to go and get sick. 

Punchdragon is still in development, but it's kind of an overwhelming project, and is going to take a lot of time. Because of that, I started another project I'd been thinking about for a while, which is much smaller, and will be playable online eventually.

It's such an early prototype that I'm not going to link it yet, but I'll be posting about it from time to time. Going to call it Project Lasers for now. (There are lasers involved.) This one's going to be playable online, eventually on Kongregate, and then I'll be working on a mobile version.

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Started modeling Emmy today! (Heyy, I'm not dead!) Many more progress shots to follow-- obviously this is super early in modeling, I haven't even put in details on or attached the head.

I'll have some updated character concepts up for her later, too.

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Days when I remember to write my ideas and development thoughts down in my notebook are good days.

Days when I remember that I have useful things for my project already written in my notebook are also good days.

Notebooks are good, in general.

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Warmup sketch before I jump into character control code.

Did a sketch of the Dragon in palette 1, because I felt like it. Going to be switching off between art and coding for a bit now, hopefully.