We have a few new screenshots we'd like to show off to you, just because we're SUPER proud of how this game is shaping up. Plus, we have a few new (and a couple of returning) team members on the project whom we'd like to introduce!
So, where to begin? Well, we've been doing more work on the overworld portion of Malevolence, and in doing so have got some juicy new screenshots to show you all:
The walls of a small city
Dungeons are spawning now, though it took us a good half an hour ofwandering around to find this one...
Yeah, we know you've seen guard towers, but this one was near a ruin! Yay!
This ancient ruin was underwater, which looks REALLY cool...
So what about these artists? Well, Rachel is back, for starters, after a bit of a break to focus on other things, and she's back with a vengeance, pumping out all of the pieces for the procedural weapons generator. She's just finished all of the dagger pieces for the demo and is moving on to the other weapons classes as we speak:
We also have recruited one Carrie Oglesby to the team, so give a warm welcome to her. You'll be seeing some of her work as time goes on, but please join us in welcoming her to the project! We're also welcoming two other artists, but we'll get you more details on them soon. We've also brought back another familiar face, Sophie Davidson! Many of our more recent followers won't know this, but Malevolence actually started out as a card game (a very cool card game) but we couldn't find investors to be able to publish it, so we decided to make a video game of the card game to raise the money to publish the card game. That was about two years ago, and... Well... The video game sort of got out of hand and everyone went bezerk about it haha. Well, to get back on topic, Sophie was one of the wonderful artists on the original card game project (which still exists, but is on hold). Sophie has come back on board to work on the art you will see in the game's intro cinematic, which you can hear the wonderful narration for here (voiced by Karen Kahler):
But new artists isn't all that's going on. We've also recently brought on board the twice published author Ryan A Span, who has also written for games such as Mount & Blade and UFO: Alien Invasion. We feel very lucky to have someone as high profile as him on the project and look forward to seeing what he comes up with to breathe a bit more life into this game.
At this point I am of course obligated to remind you to support our IndieGoGo campaign and share the link around like crazy. Contributions have slowed a bit lately, and we need that link shared around! Post it everywhere! Click the image below to visit!
And feel free to spread our pitch video, too! We've got a little under 3 weeks left in the campaign, so help us get it happening! Remember that it's a pretty neat way to get in an early pre-order of the game!
And also, as always, don't forget to follow us on the social networks!
Just awesome.
Made all the more awesome by awesome comments like this one :D
This is very cool indeed. We are also working on procedurally generated world (as yet unannounced heh), but the cities and settlements we're hand crafting and then adding them to the world as a template. The engine then assigns different parts of that template to be displayed (ie some will spawn the blacksmith, some will spawn an orchard, some will spawn a palisade, etc). How are you tackling the implementation of settlements? I would have loved to do fully procedural ones, but the data usage would have been phenomenal.
Read this: Swordofahkranox.blogspot.com.au
However, if you're short on time, they basically use the fourth dimension (time) to allow the world to be re-generated at will while maintaining the locations of EVERYTHING. In other words, you can go from Point A to Point B, regenerate at B, go back to A, regenerate at A, and everything will be exactly the same as it was before regeneration at A, B, and at all other points in-between.
...oh, and one more thing. This procedural method is, to my knowledge, EXTREMELY cost-effective in terms of memory usage compared to alternatives (I'm not privy to the specifics), and, if I've read the Malevolence news articles correctly, can easily be expanded with the ability to procedurally generate biomes, towns, cities, etc.
You're gonna put me out of a job, Expack ;) lol!
Ah thank you for that link, I had not seen that before. I've only fairly recently discovered this game but am now following it with great interest as it does a great many things I have been dreaming about seeing in games for many years now.
Well then! I can see that I'm not needed here hahahaha Thanks, Expack for clearing that up. M0rdred, you may also want to look here (http://swordofahkranox.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/hitting-big-city.html) for more info on town generation in the game. It's come a long way since then, but this was an early blog post with our early experimentation on the topic. I'd love to see some of your game if you ever get ready to show it!
Interesting, I had searched a few more of the blog posts and got some more snippets. Very cool stuff.
We're still working on our first game which should be released sometime soon, we can then turn our full energy to this other project, and I will then be able to reveal far more about it. I'll let you know when that happens :)
I look forward to it! More old-school RPGs need to be made! Let's re-invent the genre!
I'm really liking the weapon designs.
So are we! Rachel is currently working on shortswords, longswords, hatchets, battleaxes, claymores and longbows at the moment, so we're expecting a huge email from her any day now!
Awsomely awsome awsomeness. Just continue that way and you will have, not only my money, but also my doing nice little articles in RPG France.
Sounds good to us! Thank you!