Meet Float!

April 13, 2019 by SrBilyon

“ugh…… give me like… 5 more minutes ‘k?”

Float is the direct assistant to “The King”, he’s a small field mouse, but knowledgeable of Tropolis’ operations. He kind helps keep things… afloat.

 (Designs by keysatrii) 

Meet Peb!

April 12, 2019 by SrBilyon

Dev Log #1-ish?

March 24, 2019 by SrBilyon

Seeing how I missed like two weeks of mini blog posts, I’m deeming this one an actual “Devlog” (fanfare and such yada yada). I’m just going to call it a Dev Log. 

So much has gone on the last few weeks that I’m struggling to piece it all together, so here is an attempt:

Computer Adventures:

So, I don’t haven’t built a dev machine from the ground up for years now, (maybe since college?) and typically just upgrade parts as I see fit (graphics card, ram, processor, etc). 

Well, my motherboard has been giving me problems for close to a year now, where it occasionally decides “yeah, don’t really care about your boot device today”, as well as other miscellaneous things that required me to do things like removing the CMOS battery or main drive. I was also running out of upgrade options, so I got a bit fed up and decided it might be time to replace it. 

Mini Devlog – #10

March 5, 2019 by SrBilyon

Last week was a bit all over the place! (also, are these even “mini” anymore?)

Accomplishments this week:

We’ve finally picked a Vis Dev! There was a lot of talented applicants, and we took a great deal of time going through each portfolio (a few in which we might be interested in pulling in for some other positions in the future! ? )

Cindy Zhi will be joining us! Cindy, along with the rest of the background artists on board, will be developing the visual aspects of the world of Tropolis!

Here are some thumbnails and a concept piece that Cindy did as a test!

Mini Devlog – #9

February 26, 2019 by SrBilyon

 Well, last week was a busy week! Let’s get started

Accomplishments this week:

• I ended up having to rewrite a lot of the input code. This was mostly due to how I was handling presses vs holds (which I may or may not even use too much).
  
  I needed to decide how to handle determine what’s a button hold vs a button press, while also making sure that the check for holds didn’t cause there to be any delay (for example, 0.1-0.2 seconds actually felt noticeable).
  
  Ultimately for the meantime, I decided that a press will execute and a hold will follow afterward, this basically means a hold will act somewhat like a follow-up attack.
  
• I also had to review my input queuing system.
  
  The purpose of this system is to collect inputs and store them into a list, then giving the “inputs” an evaluation/expiration time. This will allow for reviewing inputs over a short period of time, and subsequently make the controls feel a little more “responsive” when pressed in succession as inputs will “register” as soon as a character is in a state that can use them (assuming that input doesn’t expire first). I’m currently using this for combat inputs.
  
  I might be doing a wack job explaining it, but here’s a video I stumbled upon a while back that inspired the idea of implementing Input Buffering:
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmTkH80uojE
  
• I also finished the Team site I mentioned in my last update. The team seems to like it, and it allowed me a chance to review a lot of materials that were written up but haven’t looked over in a while.
• 
  
• As some of you might have saw, I posted a recruit post on the blog/twitter last week. We received a littleover 50 portfolio submissions! As of this update, we’ve reviewed all of them, and have started reaching out to some of the finalists!
  
• This was definitely an insightful opportunity in many different ways (and in some ways, a tad bit stressful!)
  
• We also began a discussion on the game’s UI, which also brought up some game design concerns that we will be looking to address, such as Breeze’s stats.

Meet Jet and Clear!

February 14, 2019 by SrBilyon

(Cover Art and character art below by Komoroshi!)

Some of you might remember these two, but those who don’t, they’re quite the pair! These two lovebirds have been riding the sky’s superhighways for ages.

Mini Devlog – #8

February 12, 2019 by SrBilyon

I actually spent most of this week sick unfortunately 😛

We did manage to get some things going this week, so it wasn’t a completely lost week.

Accomplishments this week:

Meet Burney!

February 4, 2019 by SrBilyon

Burnard (his coworkers call him Burney), is the Supervisor of Heat Waves.

(Burney was originally designed by me, but once @eclipticafusion joined the team, I had no choice but to have him redo the design!)

This hog comes off as fairly imposing to those who don’t know him, but he’s actually a bit of an odd ball. He’s very wise, and very knowledgeable of the workings of Tropolis. 

Mini Devlog – #7

February 1, 2019 by SrBilyon

This was a bit of an unplanned code clean-up week!

As I was setting up/connecting remaining gameplay features to buttons, I found that some related (and unrelated) code made things a little tricky, so I decided to refactor some systems. 

I also managed to get some neat things implemented in the process.

Mini Devlog – #6

January 21, 2019 by SrBilyon

It’s been a busy couple of weeks as I’ve been tackling several things in preparation for some upcoming goals and well, planning what’s to come for 2019!

I’m going to try to tackle these “mini-devlogs” in a more repeatable format and maybe concluding the month with a larger overview of progress, etc.