Sorry for the sporadic updates, we've been crazy busy!
I threw up two images to a gallery on the deadhold site:
http://www.deadhold.com/dev-gallery/
1) Art Style:
We've started narrowing the art style for both terrain and characters. A lot of this is design based decisions, such as ensuring characters are visible against the terrain, use of contrasts and color. Working out how to use terrain materials with a larger colormap underneath that fades on pixeldepth. Myth's terrain was largely excellent at communicating passibility (certainly in comparison to modern games), and we want great looking terrain that communicates well ... ie. cake and eat it too.
2) Unit Art - Still prototype, it will all change before ship(!)
No more mannequins. Mannequins were useful, but we're getting temporary units in that act and animate much closer to actual units. Again, this will all change, but its on a better trajectory to where we want to be.
Effects:
3) We now have initial blood and (bloody) explosion effects. The most excellent
Fred Hooper is helping us out with our core effects.
4) Voice overs:
We're building preliminary voice overs, and have a voice actress scheduled soon for the first run on ranger sounds/phrases.
5) Character systems and AI:
We've started porting over blueprints in U4 to C++. U4 is still early adopter status, and we've been running into lots of ... how to say this politely ... goddamn painful issues with blueprint. Blueprint will be an amazing system in 6-12 months when they work out all the bugs. However, we can't wait for that, so we're in the midst of setting up more robust core unit systems. The astute among you might also wisely assume this is the source of some delay, but we're taking this iteratively, so its not a problem.
6) Character design and modelling:
I'm contracting some work out with some badass concept artists for three of our characters. The guy I'm working with is a friend from the industry, and he's godly. We'll have pieces coming in over the next 2 months.
We also have a zbrush artist beginning work on our "Mimic" unit.
7) Networking backend and server lobby infrastructure/UI:
Our programmer has been on this for the last month, and he's just switched off to adddress blueprint and c++ issues mentioned above.
Hrmm ... what else ....
We'd planned to show off our new stuff last weekend, but we had to pivot and address the blurprint issues, so everything is in a half or non working state. Hoping to have something substantial in a week or two!
-fisj (
fisj@deadhold.com)
