Hello again, and welcome to the 12th Dev Diary for Project Taival

This weeks subjects are;

• Progress report on the asset making videos
• Improved intro video
• Genre of the 2D game

About Making Assets

The first part of the first asset creation video has been fully edited and cut to remove the video errors that happened while recording the video. Apparently the errors were caused by Process Lasso application restrictions, which I disabled for OBS. Haven't had any video errors in my later recordings since.

I have also played with various ideas on the design of the "Now Playing" bracket and decided to try an approach, where the bracket style will be made on per-game basis - Ice being the theme in Asset creation videos, that show creation of the Horror title. I'll show a picture of the Ice theme next week.

The Intro video has been also improved a bit with more animations and will be included in the first part of the Asset Creation videos. The idea was to make the "Project Taival" text to turn rapidly to snow all at once and be blown away with the wind, but since my skills are not there yet, I had to make a compromise and the text will turn to snow gradually during the gust of wind.

City builder or RTS?

Planning of the 2D game is going forward nicely and I have come to conclusion that the game will start out as a combination of  City Builder - RTS. It will start as a single player RTS game at first, but will eventually evolve to a mobile/PC MMO, that is playable on both. Since that would be very time consuming to get ready before launch, the game will evolve in stages;

• 1st goal - make the game playable as a single player title with bare minimum of building options. (playable Alpha within 1 month of the development)
• 2nd goal - adding a rudimentary AI to play against (within 6 months of first Alpha)
• 3rd goal - create an in-game store for bonus items, which are not necessary, but speeds up the player progress a bit. (within 9 months of when development starts)
• 4th goal - add multiplayer options as soon as possible, after the game is playable.
• 5th goal - add procedurally created maps to improve the re-playability of the game. (within 1 year since development start)

The idea of the game is to build as large of a city as you can, while defending it from AI barbarians and other players. There is much more to the concept of this game, which will be revealed closer to it's final release, but lets say that the inspiration for this title came from several 4x4 games, RTS and mobile strategy titles.

I still need to come up with ways to make the purchasable bonuses balanced with the rest of the players, who would rather not use micro-transactions in their games. I have some ideas how to make this possible without nerfing the purchased bonuses too much and make them worth the money (prices will be much lower than what micro-transaction's usually have) and I'm hoping that at least some of those ideas will work in practice. All the income will be used for the development of both titles, the Horror -title and the 2D -title.

The Horror of It!

The development on the horror title will not stop, but will be slown down a bit. It is essential to make the first project something, that could secure funding for the project in less than a year and unfortunately, most likely that would not be possible with the horror title. The release estimate for the horror title will stay the same, 2 - 5 years until full release (version 1.00) and a playable preview build later this year.

UPDATE;

I got the first "publish version" of the intro video ready today, faster than expected. You can watch the new Intro video here; 

thank you for tuning in on this weeks Dev Diary and I'll see you next week!

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