Hi friends, fans & family! Hope life finds you well!
I am having the best vacation with my family! Lots of spare time and lots of relaxing. The heat over here is killing me however but walking around half naked all day is definitely worth it :D.
Let me tell you about some of the things that have been happening lately!
Level editor
I have thought long and hard about what I want the game to actually be. From the beginning the game was supposed to be something like XCOM with randomized characters etc. but it has since grown into something else entirely. Guardians of Gridvale is nowadays an RPG but a lot of the stuff that I implemented in the beginning and a lot of the thoughts that I had back then have been sticking around which has sort of muddled my design. I’ve finally decided to cut ties with the past and make this game a fully fledged tactical RPG.
What does this mean? Well, the game will now focus on a good story, characters and handcrafted content and not so much on procedural generation, faceless heroes and random story bits.
As a result of this, I thought that it would be wise to make a level editor. Here’s what that looks like:
With it I can carefully placed all the tiles and all the enemies an export it to a file. I still have to do some things manually in the file but the hard bits are done and this makes my life soooo much easier!
And speaking of editors… I’ve brought onboard someone really skilled to take a look at my writing and give me tips for improving it etc. He will only help on an hourly basis but that will surely make the story better!
Mind control
I also took the time to clean up a lot of code so I have re-factored and changed a lot of things to give the game more flexibility when it comes to designing new stuff. This allowed me to implement a cool mind control skill among other things:
New tiles
It also made it much easier for me to make new tilesets. Here’s a desert one:
Deadline
Besides these things I’ve also started to really think about how much stuff I should cram into the game and when I ”need” to finish it and this has led me to make a list of features with different ”levels” of implementation. I will work my way through the list and polish the must-haves first before I tackle the nice-to-haves. I have no idea where that will take me but I’ve set my internal deadline to 2023. Whatever I have by then will be released!
Discord server
Oh and one last thing… I HAVE A DISCORD NOW! There’s not much going on there yet but there surely will be. Check it out: https://discord.gg/nVgnJ6N6nM
With that I leave you guys for this time! Thanks for reading 🙏 // Luis
Sinister Siamese Studios 