Work in Progress #1: Classes done, Steam page next!
Hello everyone!
We want to share more informations and more “behind the scenes” stuff with everyone here so I’ll try to post a new article every other week called “Work in Progress” about our progress (duh…) and what we plan for the following weeks.
I'll cover what we did in the last couple of weeks and what we plan for the next couple of weeks, hope you like it!
Done: Classes!
Our goal since January was to create 3 different classes before August. We’re just a bit late, but not that much. We’re actually done as of right now but it took us a couple more weeks than expected (plus a much needed holiday break).
Our goal was to create a new class in about 2 to 3 months, and create both in less than six (including a rework of the Knight).
This is how our creation process went:
We took a whole month to create every skill and upgrade for the class we were working on, and getting new and fresh ideas was definitely the hardest part.
Once we had about 200 skills, upgrades and passives, we took the time to write a massive to-do list for each of us (one with the code that was needed for new/original and/or fancy skills and behaviours for me and the other with all the assets needed for Aurélien).
A class is about:
15/20 animations for the character.
About 10 assets per Skill (including upgrades and everything) which is roughly 100 assets (animated or not).
More than 200 Icons
About 50 to 70 Sounds
120 different weapons
And a gazillion lines of code :).
Mage's Poses:
Mage's Icons:
Knight's Swords:
Now we (only) had to both complete our to-do list, this is where the heavy work is but also the easiest part, you know what you have to do, you just have to do it.
It took each of us about a month to finish (without Icons and Weapons, they come a bit later).
We then put everything together and proceeded to playtest a bit, to see what was working and what needed to be polished, which took us another full week.
We did this twice, for The Fierce Huntress and for the Mischievous Mage.
We also had to rework the Mighty Knight. Being our first class, it was not that great anymore, so we took a month to rework him, we added a lot of variety and choices and about 100 new upgrades.
After about 6 months spent on building classes, we can now work on new and exciting things, starting by... a Steam Page! (yay!)
To Do: Steam Page!
We plan to open our Steam Page within 2 weeks if everything goes according to our plan.
This is where things gets real!
And it is a bit surrealistic, the next thing we have to do is actually to get a Steam page up, it's amazing. I mean, three years ago, our next thing to do was like figure out how to make a character move in GameMaker or if we wanted to go for Skeletal animation or frame by frame. We've come a LONG way.
Right now, we have to create a bunch of materials such as insane screenshots, cool icons, and obviously an up-to-date trailer!
Hopefully, for our next “Work in Progress” article, the Steam page will be open!
See you soon!
Jeremy