Greetings all. This will be the first of hopefully many
development diaries to come in which we acquaint you, the public, with
all of our comings and goings. All of our successes, and our failures,
will be shared with you. That way, you know we are constantly
progressing, even if things seem quiet. I will try to write one of these
every couple of weeks, but I can't guarantee anything until our
development is progressing on a more established schedule. I will also
attempt to give you insight into a certain gameplay mechanic with each
of these diaries. I will provide information about the mechanic, how it
works, and why we chose to use it. Now, let's get right into it.
I want to start this development diary off with an apology to everyone
that has ever given us a moment of their time. I want to apologize for
giving dates for milestones or updates that have, more often than not,
fallen through or been pushed back in some way. I get caught up in my
own excitement too often, and I tend to forget that even a small bump in
the road can push our progress back by a few weeks. We've run into
technical issues, we've had team members leave (a few without warning),
and personal responsibilities just have to take precedent sometimes. So,
I am going to do my best to stop providing all of you with hopeful
dates for our progress. I will tell you what we are working on, but will
give little to no indication as to when it is finished, unless it is
being uploaded for you to see, or damn close to it. Now
that the unpleasantness is out of the way, let's discuss the excitement.
I am personally extremely excited at our current situation and our
progress. In the past couple months, we have achieved the following
goals:
*Re-wrote our entire code base in a more organized and efficient format.
*Cut out unnecessary gameplay elements and decided upon ones that will work.
*Established an overall more focused approach to everything we are working on.
*Slowly recruited our way into a more permanent, well rounded team that can achieve almost any task.
That all sounds well and good, I know, but what have we actually created?
Well, for one thing, our new monster artist, Christian, has finished two
zombies and is currently finishing the third. Griffin is finishing our
first set of armor, and then he will be dedicating all of his efforts to
the creation of our first environment. Our brand new animator, Michael,
will be providing our main character with a full set of brand new
animations, and then will move onto bringing Christian's monsters to
life. Jack, our new UI designer, is going to provide us with an even
better version of our UI than the one we have now.
Once the aforementioned tasks are complete, we will be capable of building
our gameplay demo outright. I'm talking the whole nine yards. Randomized
monster spawns, leveling up, random loot drops, equipping armor, and
more. It might take us some time to refine it all and implement the
content into our programming, but at this point, having the content
finished is our biggest concern. Our gameplay demo will
hopefully lead us to a Kickstarter campaign or something similar, and
from there, continued development, a new website, and more. But, let's
not get ahead of ourselves.
Now, to discuss a gameplay feature with all of you. Let me say that we proudly embrace the games
that influence the development of Flesh Asunder. Diablo 1+2, Hellgate:
London, Path of Exile, and more, have all provided us with inspiration. I
would recommend any of these games to ARPG fans. And, since Path of
Exile hit Open Beta status as of yesterday, perhaps it seems fitting
that I will share our injector system with you. Path of
Exile uses "Flasks" instead of your standard RPG potions. What's
different about Flasks, you ask? Well, Flasks can be refilled by killing
monsters. Each use of a flask uses up a certain number of that Flask's
maximum number of charges. Killing monsters adds a certain number of
charges back to the Flask. This saves the player from having to make
runs back to town for dozens of potions at a time, and prevents the
player from "potion spamming" their way to victory. In addition, the
Flasks in Path of Exile, like most other items, can be found in several
different rarities. So the player may find a Flask that not only heals
them, but buffs their movement speed while they are being healed.
Our injector system will work much in the same way that the Flask system
works in Path of Exile. We will make our own adjustments to it, as we do
with all of our gameplay mechanics, but the idea of consumables that
can be refilled struck me as a very innovative and progressive gameplay
mechanic. With that, I hope you have enjoyed our first (written) development diary. Please keep your eyes open for future updates.
-Tony
