Progress Update 7/11/20

Welcome back to another blog post. Thanks for tuning in!

The first thing that should be mentioned, and something that many of you have been curious about for a while is the new remodel of the character. Our 3D modeler and animator, Empty Space Studios, has been working together with the lead creative director, Upside Films, to create a better, more refined model for our main protagonist. Not only is this just a stylistic change, but many of the technical issues we were previously having with the player character were due to the models and animations. Thanks to this new and improved model, development in terms of the player character should be a lot more smooth from now on! We are currently in the works of replacing the models and animations for the player character so that we can finally, finally say the player is complete!
On the more technical side of things, enemy AI has been making steady progress towards completion! Although it is still in the early stages of adding mechanics and such, it is estimated that the mechanics of the AI should be mostly complete by next week! I’m not at liberty to explain much about how the enemy AI functions or what it does just yet, since we have not properly play tested these mechanics and they are subject to drastic change. In the mean time, however, just know that progress on enemy AI is coming along very smoothly.
You may be wonder why there have been no concrete teasers or videos of the game in action yet. This is due to the fact that, although the team has been hard at work with many different parts of the game, we are now just barely getting to the point where our project is resembling a game with a starting point, a goal, a failure state, and an end point. The good news about this, however, is that due to our progress, you should be able to see some more videos and teasers about the game in the coming weeks!
Once again, thank you all so much for taking the time out of your day to read this, and I, as well as the rest of the team hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day.

Progress Update: 7/4/20

Hello, and again, welcome to another progress update with me, your host: IdolMike!

Pictured above is some concept art made by Empty Space Studios

On the subject of the player controller and aesthetic, I’m pleased to announce that, other than a visual change coming up (which I’ll describe later), the player and all of their controls are complete! Like previously mentioned, our goal now is mainly focused on the enemy AI and how we can make fighting large groups of them fun and engaging at all times. This is the only mechanic left to be implemented before we can start working with play testers to squash out bugs before release.

Recently, our team has been discussing a re-design of the character models to make it easier for them to work on. Although we are not ready to announce the new models just yet, it’s possible that we will announce them sooner than you think.

At the moment, the first play tester pre-release build for the game is around 80% complete, and only progressing faster every week. After releasing the first play tester build, we will start squashing all the bugs we can find and begin work on the first 6 levels for the demo release! Since most of the foundation for the game is being built in this first private pre-release, the following test builds should be developed and released to our play testers much quicker than before. After we believe that everything is fixed up and polished to our liking, we will be able to release the demo for everyone to enjoy!

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this, and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day.

Progress Update: 6/27/20

Another Saturday, another progress update!

Over the past week, the team has been hard at work trying to finish up and polish the character controller, and we are happy to say that we are still making steady progress on the game. Unfortunately, however, there were many obstacles and roadblocks in the way that we were not expecting at all, from programming issues to animation difficulties. Because of this, our plan to finish up the character movement and controls last week did not turn out. Despite this, we are still determined to create a game play experience that meets the standard we have been imagining for months, and to do this, we ask that you provide us another week to figure out all of the technical issues with the player controller before moving onto other mechanics such as enemy AI systems. Aside from bug fixes, we are happy to announce that there are only a few more small mechanics to implement into the controller such as crouching, attack types and misc animations before it is complete for the demo release!
In other news, Empty Space Studios has been working both on animations and models for the game, to really bring that sense of life into the world we’ve built for you. Pictured above is a model for a weapon that you may be able to unlock later into the game’s campaign. How exciting!
Another thing that should be addressed is the total progress the game has made during the first few weeks of development. Although it is too early to estimate the progress needed until the release, after doing a few rough estimates, we can safely announce that the first debug build for play testing purposes is about 66% complete. After that, we will be working with play testers to help debug and polish the game while finishing up the demo.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this post, and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day!

Progress Update: 6/20/2020

Woo! It’s that time again, isn’t it? Today, we have some very interesting things to talk about.

Above you are some alpha animations for the main character. Over this week, we’ve been taking the time to try and solidify the game’s controls, to make them feel as fun and as comfortable as possible to play. There’s been a few bumps here and there, and we’ll need at least another week to polish up the controls to our liking, but rest assured that progress on the game is coming along just fine!
While focusing on the player character, we also decided that now would be a good time to implement some animations to really make the main character feel alive in the world they’re inhabiting. Thanks to EmptySpaceStudios, we were able to implement some very nice animations and adjust them to the game’s needs.
As of right now, the character model looks very unfinished. Since our main focus for this week was controls and animations, there really hasn’t been much of a need to finish up the player model just yet, however there are plans in the works to address this issue later down the line. Even then, when the time to finish the model finally comes, we might want to let you see it in game for yourself instead of spoiling it here!
Our plan for next week is going to be about finishing up the character controls and animations, and polishing them to our liking. If we still have time during the week, we might consider starting work on an NPC AI system we’ve been planning out for a very long time, or remaking a few in-game models to match our current standards.
Anyway, thank you all so much for reading, and have a wonderful rest of your day!

Progress Update: 6/13/20

Well hello again!

I’m happy to announce that since the last dev log, we have made a lot of progress towards the development of Legend 2! Some things are still being kept secret for now, but there’s plenty of stuff we can talk about.

The first thing that should be addressed is not directly linked to the game, but to this dev log. Our team has decided that a new progress update will come out every Saturday, no matter what has or hasn’t been done during that time. This will help with scheduling and generally notifying anybody interested when they should expect some new info on the game. Anyway, onto the actual game stuff.

Like previously mentioned, there has been a lot of progress on the technical side of development. We are quickly and efficiently building up a strong foundation for the rest of the game, and I think I speak for the whole team when I say that we’re pretty confident in the game’s pace at the moment. We’ve been working on everything from player movement, menus, loading screens, AI, and all the other basic necessities for a game to function properly. This foundation is a crucial part of development, since everything else is built on top of it, so if the foundation is half assed, the game is bound to crumble (See: Yandere Simulator). Due to this, we have been taking our time trying to get everything right so that development isn’t incredibly slow and painful in the future. The one unfortunate side effect of this, however, is that there’s hardly anything visual to show people yet! Fortunately for you, I brought you all some very blurry pictures of who knows what! Ready?

What could these be? Who knows!

Anyway, like I said in a previous dev log, in the next couple of months our plan is to get the game to a state in which we can start handing out early play testing builds to our play testers so that they can start looking for glitches and exploits while we work on polishing the game for the release of a demo.

Thank you all for being so patient! It’s super appreciated in times like this.

Progress Update: 6/6/20

Hello everyone! Programmer for CoolGroup Games here.

A few months ago, the team was hard at work trying to come up with a suitable concept for our next game. After hours of back and fourth discussion and many failed attempts to find something that we all wanted to do, we finally found something better than we’d ever have imagined. Our idea was to create a Beat-’em-up adventure game with RPG elements in which you travel the lands of distant kingdoms all inevitably struck with the same fate (of which I am not at liberty to give details about just yet). We would use the code name, “Legend 2”.

After we all agreed on this concept, we got to work planning as much as we could with the story, game play, mechanics and so on. Until today, we had no game play or screenshots to show, since it was still only in its planning phase, (hence the lack of any concrete teasers) but from this point forward, we can finally start making the game we’ve been dreaming about for around as long as BTWS’ entire development took. The ball is finally starting to roll and you might start to see quite a few more teasers and sneak peaks for this game as time goes on.

At the moment, our plan is to start building prototype levels and mechanics so that we can thoroughly work with our play testers to bring the best experience to the table as we possibly can.

Thank you all for your time, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day!

Woo… site’s up!

Hello everybody! Programmer for CoolGroup Games here.

Today is the launch of probably the most bland and bare bones website you’ve ever seen! This is blog post is really just a test to see how this website functions (and if it even functions at all), and I hope you all can bare with me as I try and figure out how to computer. Anyway, this website is really just going to be for updates and more in-depth info on how the development of our games go, so if you’re interested, feel free to check up on this website whenever 🙂

I’m most likely going to be posting something else a few hours after this website goes live, so stay tuned hopefully!