Hey everybody! Today I’d like to tell you a little bit about what we’ve been working on, and what’s coming down the pipe in the near future. Firstly, there’s the two things I’m super excited about: Concept art, and music posts.
Concept Art
Our concept artist Eleanor has already finished a lot of internal sketches for the team, but right now she’s working on a few special pieces just for you (in color and everything). They should begin to give you a better picture of the world and characters of Greywater who have thus far only been represented by pixel-y goodness. Here’s a sneak peek at some of my favorite of the early Doctor sketches.
Music
Chris, our composer, has been working for a while now on a video tour through his compositional process—from the rough outline of a track to the finished piece. I don’t mean to jynx it, but it should be ready soon. If you’re good, we may even include some additional finished tracks when he posts it. Both this and the concept art post shouldn’t be too far on the horizon. To tide you over, here’s a peek at an experiment in ambient: the Sewer theme!
Heartland Alpha 2.0: Public Release
There are only a few big bugs which need to be squashed before the next version of the playable alpha gets released into the wild—one being the in-game behavior of our friend the Clockwork Worm. Also, I think that whole Tavish swinging an invisible wrench thing still needs addressing.Once those are dealt with, we’ll post the build for all to play, and look forward to your feedback. Generally speaking, version 2.0 includes a number of fixes and improvements over the first, and adds a few systems, such as NPC dialogue and quests.
Multiplay-what? (More Like Multi-Butt)
When I first started outlining the gameplay experience I wanted for Greywater, I flirted a lot with the idea of a cooperative multiplayer mode, with a second character to help Tavish through his journey. This character’s efforts would be acknowledged, but they wouldn’t stand in the way of the original singleplayer narrative (sort of like how Legend of Mana handled it).Multiplayer isn’t something I was ever sure was going to happen, because there’s a lot in the game that needs to happen first.
However, Ziga (a member of our Prograrmy) has been fooling around with networking, and apparently having reasonable success. With that in mind, multi-player is neither confirmed nor off the table, but the idea is one we’ll continue to weigh carefully as we move forward. If we do, we’ll likely support between two and four players in a single game. That’s it for now, but we’ll try to update a little more often. As always, we’d love to hear from you and your friends. Bug us on twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, or wherever. See you next time!
—Benjamin
