Hello Again Mortals,
We've been building up our energy over the past month to unleash our collective Super Power: a blast of content from every party member. We've got sounds, art, and game design coming at you.
Zoundz:
Our sound guy, Blake Allen, has been producing tracks for the Sins and levels as well as sound effects for the game itself. He's ready to show off the theme-songs for two Sins, Envy and Gluttony, and has included some insight into his production process for all us noise-makers.
Envy:
Envy by Blake Allen
Blake- This was one of the hardest themes to conceptualize. Many people have experienced Envy, yet how does Envy sound? For this track I focused the feelings of paranoia, which often are accompanied with people with jealousy and envy. The faster 808 bass drum in combination with the chromatically dropping cello notes accomplished this feeling of alienation quite well.
Gluttony:
Gluttony by Blake Allen
Blake- The inspiration here was to make it as bassy and fat as possible. I took a lot of inspiration from Trent Moller on this track, which may be apparent to fans of the electronic musician. By incorporating the hard hitting beats, I tried to approximate what having a 400 pound blob barreling down on you would feel like.
Art:
The team's biggest "department" is art. We have Liz Hollerman, Art Director; Josh Landis, Concept Artist; Christian Pulla & Luke Friar-Plikaitis, Environment Artists; and Mike Steele, Character Artist. They've been working hard on everything from a new trailer (which will be presented at MAGFest) to coloring in the levels with props and backgrounds. Today they're excited to present new angels that are in-game and ready to kick some Sin ass.
By the end of January they should have all of Hell and most of Purgatory filled in with art.
Game Design:
Our industrious programming duo, Daniel Menard and Vincent Hippoman, has been cranking out levels like hot cakes and smashing bugs like... well, bugs. They've finished hell1, hell2, and hell4. The only level in Hell left to be crafted is hell3; the only one in Heaven is Lust's virtue level. Hell's boss looked funky, so we're giving it a complete makeover. A few levels in Purgatory and Earth need similar treatment before we call the game complete, but all-in-all we're close enough to Alpha to start shining our armor, fluffing our beds, coating ourselves in perfume, and everything else a party of Sins must do to prepare for a red letter day.
We've had some trouble getting Party of Sin to work efficiently on Xbox360, but recently the team's had a breakthrough; Dan changed the way the engine loaded assets (sound effects, textures, etc.) so that instead of loading them up one by one, the game loads them all at once before gameplay starts. This greatly reduces lag, but we're still working on optimizing a little more to get the game running as smoothly as possible on Xbox360's slightly dated CPU.
That's all folks, check back in the future for more updates as we get the final bits of the game polished up and ready to show off.
Cheers!
The Party of Sins
