I apologize for the lack of updates on official channels, though I have posted progress on my personal Twitter account, but recently opened an official one just for this. Over the last half a year, a number of events had turned my life upside down, and made it difficult for me to muster up a public face and address you all. An immediate family member had passed away unexpectedly, followed by an announcement that another immediate family member had a terminal illness. This was proceeded by a number of other personal setbacks that made my living situation very unstable.
Without saying more, 2015 has been the most difficult and devastating time of my life, but I deeply apologize for not being more organized in communicating. I’ve recruited help to better facilitate this in the future and answers all concerns and questions in a timely manner.
I’ve recently relocated and have begun to finally put my affairs into order – in addition to emotionally recovering from the events of last year. I have a stable environment where I can be aggressively productive, but even during the chaos of the past year, there has been significant progress I would like to share.
In early spring, we had a prototype available and called for beta-testers. We had gathered a lot of valuable feedback and since then we are making strides in our design and we are currently building a more realized and tested battle system in our engine, Unity.
Our first improvement was to design a clearer UI that more heavily relied on visual elements to communicate information and data more intuitively, bucking the need for traditional walls of text and numbers. This will make the game easier to localize into other languages as well. An additional feature- the new UI will have support for colorblind players.
We had received feedback from our testers that the previous public build was difficult, so we are still working on balancing and brainstorming skills. We plan on offering another public build in the future to allow players to test these improvements and provide more feedback to make the game play as well as possible.
Americana Dawn is an attempt to create American folklore, and there is a mythological aspect to it that involves the supernatural. For a long time, it was a challenge for us to create idiosyncratic designs that was unique and not based on previous civilizations. We are fortunate enough to have Hitoshi Sasaki, designer for Final Fantasy 6, Bahamut Lagoon and other Square-Enix (Squaresoft) titles, on board to create beautiful, unique and intriguing monster designs.
Here are two of Mr. Sasaki's designs:
Rendition of the Headless Horseman
River God of the Savannah River, Georgia
What is the current status of the project?
While development had not ceased, it was slower than average due to the chain of events in my personal life and some reshuffling within the staff. The game is currently being developed in the Unity Engine/Tiled, and we are working to create better development tools to create a more efficient production pipeline.
I have carefully looked at the scope of the project, and found ways to better use resources to cut the budget down from our original $70k projection to make a future crowd funding campaign more realistic.
How is this project being financed with the last failed Kickstarter? Will you re-do the Kickstarter?
I have meager earnings as a current graduate student, and I plan on picking up an extra job if possibly next season.
I do not want to restart any fundraiser until I have two things:
A demo to prove that this game exists and will become a reality.
Until I have all the static sprites for the enemies in this game and a finalized list of skillsets so I can get a precise amount on how much money left is required to complete the creation of art assets in this game. That is a sizable chunk of the budget, and it is important I have a clear value in mind. I do not want to throw out random estimate and realize I asked for too much or too little.
In addition, I plan on refunding anyone who wants their money back from the original fundraiser as an apology for the among of development time this has taken.
Since I relocated to another state, the original name for the group (Bit Bonton) went defunct. We changed our name to Puptea Softworks.
Thanks for reading, here is a little improvisational video of Americana Dawn’s main theme to end this update.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVOXT430NEo
andulkaphoto
kianamaiart
stormborns
2087
titsay
amandla
pixelskylines