Nine of All Trades

Drawings? Frequently. Game Dev? Usually. (I also happen to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)

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_Sometimes, being lost is just an excuse to wander._

Tamin, a character from Dual Resonance.

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New years resolution:

Actually finish a project this year

There are other things too but that's the big one.

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If information is power, in war, information is life.

Not much has changed functionally (not visually, anyways). Most of the work I did since the last update was updating user interface and visual aspects of the game, to make information available to the player.

Now to make it look halfway decent.

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Well, it doesn't look like much, but the AI is working as well as it needs to be for now.

Oh yeah, I guess this is that "gameplay" of Dual Resonance I've been talking about - guess I ought to explain some of it.

Down in the bottom left corner is your "Commander," a character that determines how many resources you get each turn (this one is Copper). To the right of her portrait is the list of units you can spawn in - usually, a maximum of 8, but for this scenario, just 1. Spawning in units costs gold (real creative, right?), and players can only do it in the blue zone, while the enemy can only spawn units on the red tiles. Each unit (usually) has one or two abilities. These abilities cost a resource called Resonance, but I'll explain that later when I actually have someting better to showcase them with (since I haven't decided on any abilities for Loyal Squire yet).

But hey, now that the core gameplay is implemented, I can go about making it look better (or making it so that the game actually knows you beat the level).

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tfw when you come up with an amazing mechanic for your game but deadlines and other assignments come up so you can't work on it so you want to talk about it instead with other people but there's nobody around to geek out with you over your own mechanic

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Some are mercenaries. Others are knights. And others are just civilians trying to survive.

Hopefully I'll actually have time to show off some gameplay footage this week, but with the GRE and final exams coming up soon, take this rough-draft art of some of the characters that will show up in Dual Resonance. A key part of the gameplay is summoning allies to fight for you on a small 5x5 grid and using their strengths and abilities to win. These are those, and I currently have 14 planned with 9 either partially or wholly implemented.

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It had been so long since they’d seen each other that Copper couldn’t help but  take a rest to catch up with Amarine. By the end of their conversation, like the Loyal Squire she was, Amarine had resolved to help Copper continue on her quest.

Copper on the left, Amarine on the right. Both are characters in the game I’m developing for one of my classes here at BYU. Hopefully, it’s playable by the due date (and hopefully I’ll have some form of footage soon).

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I T-pose in your general direction. Well, I guess it's not so much of a T-pose...

It's not much, but I'm glad that progress on this thing is going well enough. It's just kinda progress that you can't really see, is the problem. Maybe soon I'll have some actual gameplay to show.

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Tamin is a schirip, an alien race that uses that ring on their back to fly.

I designed her instead of studying for my physics exam during the week. While I was taking the exam, I doodled her on my scratch paper about halfway through to give my brain a quick rest.

You'll most likely be seeing more of her later.

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Almanaught.

3D modeling is hard, but it's still cool to see this guy in more than two dimensions. He'll be colored soon, but not yet. That assignment isn't due for another week or so.

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More's working on the first try than I was expecting... which probably means that there's a lot of things that are broken and I just don't know it yet.

It looks like the basics for Dual Resonance are lining up fairly well. This is showing units moving around freely around on the game board - too freely, but I wanted to make sure they could move at all - and soon, this will be freed from the confines of an error-prone CLI interface and let loose in a horrendously ugly 3D environment (as a 3D modeler I am not and the class requires the game to be in 3D).

With progress going this well and with 3 months left to work on it for the class, I'm excited to see where DR ends up. Hopefully it ends up with a different (read: better) name.

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UMLs, amiright?

This is the (preliminary) class diagram for the game I'll (hopefully) be working on this semester for one of my classes. It's tentatively called "Dual Resonance," and is an unholy amalgamation between a TRPG, card game, and RTS.

It's less complex than it sounds.

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Lore: a lazy, wandering, deity of death.

I need to stop fiddling around with this, otherwise I’ll never get it done. (There’s a lot of things I’d like to change, but isn’t it pretty much always that way?)

Here's @thirdkeyofsun‘s character, Lore, from MoGiSho (thanks for the follow!). It’s been really fun to see how the game’s evolved over time, so I thought I’d do this. I’ll probably end up doing more fan art soon, too - it was fun and a good learning experience. (My classes just started up again though, so updates will be sparse, but that’s par for the course, isn’t it?)

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Bob the Builder x Midna is the best pairing ever. Don't @ me.

...here's a bit of a screenshot from the game my brother and I are working on.

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Allomancy. One of the three metallic arts and an end-positive form of investiture. Native to Scadrial, Allomancy requires the user to ingest some metal for them to "burn" later on, giving them some power or benefit.

I started working on this project forever ago. But, since I lost the original files a while back, I figured it'd be as good a time as any to start over. At least this time, I already have the outlines all done, so expect me to actually finish it this time around.

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Shimmer is the patron of the Prismatic Arches. She's got the strongest maternal instinct in the group.

Another character from Lavender's Wish, and potentially my favorite after the main character. I might get around to posting that eventually.

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Screech is the patron of the Hanging City. Ironically, he’s on the quieter side.

He’s a character from one of the projects I’m working on called Lavender’s Wish. It’s that prototype I showed off a while back.