As I’ve mentioned in my post accounting for the past year, my brother has sort of jump-started Nectira by picking up and running with the development of some of the more-system-based elements. While I’ve had a hard time, after setting up my entrepreneurial pursuits this past year, to carve out nights of development like I used to be able to, his progress on “my game” has encouraged me to make what time I can: recently, 2 – 3 hours, 3 nights a week, plus maybe a coffee shop session.
It turns out that little bit of time can put a big dent in a game project like Nectira. I’ve got so many of the “bones” of this game built. I get to fill the game with fun content now!
Here’s what that fun content looked like in July (or at least a couple weeks of it):
The new Ruby Gemstone plants an elemental bomb (element is “Flame” here).
The new Amber Gemstone unleashes an elemental hornet swarm (“Spore” element shown).
New Music! (will add link later). I was (thankfully?) under the influence of Percocet when I composed this “Mob Battle” song. I think the prescription for surgery recovery helped me channel energy from a dark dimension. Haha.
Beyond the two gemstones and few other little things I worked on, my brother knocked out some goodies, which together have a big impact on the game, but nothing that is worth capturing in a GIF. Here’s a list of his contributions from the last few weeks:
- Replaced my subtitle images with the same font and text used, drawn by the system. This greatly reduces the number of texture pages the game needs to use (which can fill up system memory quickly).
- Displays background to animated Game Guide GIFs, which is an improvement over my black-out. Did the same for smaller windows.
- Added functionality to skip cut scenes and subtitles (which is very helpful since we’ve been play-testing so much!)
- Updated how my Yarku Runt spawns work, to produce them in more-balanced numbers
- Recorded the next bit of voice acting for Celaemus.
Aside from us both fixing and updating some minor things, that’s it for July’s progress. I’m excited to keep going and have more to show for, next month!