TS Production Update

This is an update for Templar Skies production for the past week.

Making this game has been an incredible learning experience for myself. I do have a habit of  dreaming too big, and fiddling around with tech and features instead of implementing content, which is the game itself. Before I take what I’ve learnt to make my next (smaller and more realistic) game, I need to suppress the designer in me to get Templar Skies completed. It’s now in a boring and frustrating part of it’s development cycle – testing, balancing and bug fixing.

So this past week I did a few things. Put together a final asset list, something that should have been done months ago. Due to my iterative development process, and my continual cuts to the game, assets have remained in a state of flux during the whole development cycle. I’ve started re-branding my promotional stuff towards this game, instead of the whole Inspire project. The new product page for TS can be found here.

I’ve also built a solid alpha of TS from the ashes of Inspire. I took some basic design elements, code sections I knew worked very well, and some simpler features, and rolled them into a new version. I removed some of the old resources, and added these 2. Dynamic Gravity Modification for 1.5.2, so that I could have flying/hovering monsters, standard in TD games. I also added Damage/Text Popup on Objects for some additional feedback on combat. A lot of the data entry for game objects has been done also. Imagining awesome items is always much more fun than doing the data entry for them

And I still have to finalize level design, I’m just not happy with it. Constructor is an awesome tool, but level design, and the patience it requires, is not one of my strong points. The design doc also needs to be updated with these changes, a tedious but necessary task.

This next week:

• level tweaking
• start adding in final data and assets
• bug smishin
• polishing
• playtesting