I've been working long and hard on the game these past few months, and I have some great updates to share!
First, I want to reiterate that the currently available demos, and the final release of the game, will all be free and open-source.
Despite the fact it's more high-profile than anything I've ever made before, I refuse to take money for the game, and I promote it solely in the hopes that people enjoy it. My GitHub repository hosts all the code and assets for the game. Except the original soundtrack (due to mutual agreements with my composers), just about everything is available under open-source or Creative Commons licenses!
I've decided to rename it to Shards of Grandeur, for a couple reasons. Mainly, it fits the theme of the story better, and I feel is a bit catchier to those who don't know what "Uvutu" is. With that, I've got some visuals to share!
First is the new main menu, which I upgraded to celebrate the new name of the game:
And secondly, I was working on improving battles so that the various events that occur (taking damage, healing, getting status'd, or gaining stat boosts) play a little animation with text that rises up over the combatant. This will help players visually track the action and reduce the need for the detailed combat log.
This required quite a bit of muscle to pull off, as unfortunately my previous implementation of battle animations was very spaghettified. Turns out, a lot of scope creep ballooned my idea of what battle animations would look like. Although I am very happy with the results, I wasn't so happy with the state of the code. I refactored all of that code into its own script file, which led to plenty of improvements to the stability of animations as well.
Finally, I have reworked the Stats menu to be a little bit easier to understand and look at. Previously it was 4 "sub-menus" all stacked into the same screen, so I just broke them apart into tabs. Stats for your HP and stat points, Equipment for your Weapon and Armor slots, Moves for your moveset, and Minions for your minions list.
The original Stats menu is available, as a toggle option in the Settings, but it will be off by default. Proceed at your own risk if you enable it, because it's pretty a dense menu like that!
I continue to work on content! My target is for another demo in about a month or so. I'm getting closer to having most of the maps for this demo completed, and pretty much all that's left is to decide some of the finer points about the story and implement it all.
After this demo, I plan to not post another release until the full game can be released! I will continue to post updates when I find the time. If I add new features I would like community testing on, or make sweeping rebalances of content, I will potentially create small demos to test, without any additional story content to play. But this is it, it's time to ramp up on the story content production!
First, I want to reiterate that the currently available demos, and the final release of the game, will all be free and open-source.
Despite the fact it's more high-profile than anything I've ever made before, I refuse to take money for the game, and I promote it solely in the hopes that people enjoy it. My GitHub repository hosts all the code and assets for the game. Except the original soundtrack (due to mutual agreements with my composers), just about everything is available under open-source or Creative Commons licenses!
I've decided to rename it to Shards of Grandeur, for a couple reasons. Mainly, it fits the theme of the story better, and I feel is a bit catchier to those who don't know what "Uvutu" is. With that, I've got some visuals to share!
First is the new main menu, which I upgraded to celebrate the new name of the game:
And secondly, I was working on improving battles so that the various events that occur (taking damage, healing, getting status'd, or gaining stat boosts) play a little animation with text that rises up over the combatant. This will help players visually track the action and reduce the need for the detailed combat log.
As well, I added some small animations to the Orbs bar when gaining or spending Orbs in battle. That was demonstrated in this video as well!
This required quite a bit of muscle to pull off, as unfortunately my previous implementation of battle animations was very spaghettified. Turns out, a lot of scope creep ballooned my idea of what battle animations would look like. Although I am very happy with the results, I wasn't so happy with the state of the code. I refactored all of that code into its own script file, which led to plenty of improvements to the stability of animations as well.
Finally, I have reworked the Stats menu to be a little bit easier to understand and look at. Previously it was 4 "sub-menus" all stacked into the same screen, so I just broke them apart into tabs. Stats for your HP and stat points, Equipment for your Weapon and Armor slots, Moves for your moveset, and Minions for your minions list.
The original Stats menu is available, as a toggle option in the Settings, but it will be off by default. Proceed at your own risk if you enable it, because it's pretty a dense menu like that!
I continue to work on content! My target is for another demo in about a month or so. I'm getting closer to having most of the maps for this demo completed, and pretty much all that's left is to decide some of the finer points about the story and implement it all.
After this demo, I plan to not post another release until the full game can be released! I will continue to post updates when I find the time. If I add new features I would like community testing on, or make sweeping rebalances of content, I will potentially create small demos to test, without any additional story content to play. But this is it, it's time to ramp up on the story content production!
Are there any public beta builds yet? How much of this port have you done so far?
