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Beastmancer is a monster tamer tactical RPG. Play as an adventurer in a fantasy world, capture monsters and use them to fight turn based tactical battles.

Post news Report RSS Beastmancer: Progress Report # 6

Getting close to my first deadline! New environment, UI elements and a lot of coding done!

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Hi

My first deadline: to finish the core features during this month is getting closer but I still took a moment to make this article and keep you all informed so let's begin:

New Environment: Town

In this video I'm testing a new environment: a simple fishing town. It was a quick test of the pathfinding and lighting so I still haven't added NPCs and other dynamic objects.

From Dialogue to Combat

Here I'm testing the transition between dialogue with a NPC and combat with the same character. While this doesn't show it, there's a lot of coding done in order to get this working.

New monsters

There's still a lot of monsters to configure, that is to create proper animation blend trees, assign attacks, sound effects, particle systems, add stats in the database, etc. Of course, that can't stop us from just showing the models:

Aquillator


Ghouls


Ratkin


More UI elements

Yep, more UI work. I know this is not specially exciting (and is a bit boring to do) but I still have a few more screens to do.

Crafting panel

Crafting


New UI elements

Barter


New UI elements

Quests Journal


Loot

Looting


Lots of Coding

In my experience, a game is a fun and exciting task in the beginning when you are making a quick prototype and in the end when you are preparing your launch trailer. In the middle is still fun but is mostly hard work, I think we are finally reaching that stage. I say it because most of my current workload is to code: link UI elements to functions (like drag and drop or creating buttons for the elements the player has actually collected), connect some systems (combat and dialogue for example) and deal with persistence. This last point is specially important to me because I use what I call a "Game Session", this object basically stores all the information of the player: his location, his inventory, spells, monsters captured and their states, quests, dialogue variables, basically any data that the player can change is stored there. In that way this data is kept while changing scenes and the Game Session can even be converted to a binary file and become a save file.

This is all serious stuff but is a bit hard to make it as marketing material.

Dragging UI elements


Preparing for Greenlight

I haven't reached this stage yet but at the end of this month, all the core features should be working so my next objective should be to start making content (new environments, actual gameplay) because I'll need a trailer and a gameplay video as my best cards for Greenlight. I decided to go with Greenlight before making a public prototype because its the best way to make some actual promoting. In my opinion, posting on Reddit, Twitter and even here only leads to other devs seeing your game so its not a really effective marketing strategy. I don't really fear Greenlight (I already pass it once) and I would like to have a store page ready ASAP in order to start gaining wishlists and followers in Steam. Once that's done I'll worry about making a good playable ptototype and start gathering feedback.

Of course, preparing for Greenlight will still take some time, in the meantime I keep working in the core features and I'll probably have a new article by the end of the month.

Regards,

Jorge

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