Hey guys! Thanks for sticking around! So, after a brief Christmas vacation, I'm back in the saddle and working on the game again. I just played my prototype a few times, and the new screen shot I uploaded here is what we've got. You can see it needs a little polish, but both the broom racing tracks, and the divination (by crystal ball) classes are too. Pretty soon I'll have all the things we need to it to start looking like a real working school of magic. The thing I'm working most on is different students, with directional walking animation. Right now there's just the one kind of student, and no animations. If you've been with me since the early days of development you might notice the only character you've seen was based on a race from my initial design on this game, with a space theme. See here and here and here. It's the same engine, but the space theme just wasn't working. I'd like to one day revisit the idea. But for now, I want to add some different looking students, and to have them have animations for sitting, reading, broom racing and learning in the different classes.
I'll also be adding some teachers, and working on AI for them. We'll be able to tell them which classes to teach, with the teachers being better at teaching different subjects, some more boring, etc. As well as adding some things lexi (my wife and art helper) wants to draw and add. Hopefully I'll have these changes done by the end of february. I'll update then and let you know. I'm going to take them time that month to do some better videos to show current gameplay.
Long term, I feel like this year will be the year I can be showing some real cool gameplay, and get the game exciting enough to start selling an alpha version, or maybe kickstart it. I think it'll be clearer what would be best as the game develops and we see how people feel about it. But however it ends up, I feel pretty sure there should be a way to get your hands on this game before 2016. :)
Please feel free to leave any comments and suggestions and I'll answer them all as best I can!
