If you haven’t checked out the current state of Once More yet, give it a peek. You can find its demo by clicking the tab near the top of the page.
The artist for the game is Luka M., of c404.net. We worked together before on Stranded, and he’s also known for Nuclear Eagle, The Classroom, and several others. Also worth noting is that it looks like Danny B. is going to do the music–He’s the guy who wrote the tunes for Spewer.
We’re gradually getting art put into the game. At this point we’ve got a very nice system for rendering the terrain. We start with a big block of terrain texture that’s the size of the full screen. This is chopped up to only show up where the terrain actually is. Some flourishes are added, like jaggy edges and grass, and then some simple filtering is applied for shading. Here’s the breakdown visually–Click on each image for a full view.
I’ve been experimenting lately with a very open style of development. I try to keep the available demo on the site as up to date as possible, and anyone who shows up can test it. As a bonus for you guys, anyone who gives me some feedback gets to be in the credits with all the other testers. The idea is that I can see how people feel about each little thing that’s being added, and the people get to be part of the development process. Something I’ve noticed is that people are very good at recognizing what elements of games they do and don’t like, but when there’s something they don’t like, they often don’t know what changes should be made to fix it. That’s fine, because making changes to fix problems is sort of my job. One of the hardest parts of designing anything is being aware of what elements aren’t as good as everything else–Every chef loves their own soup. Random people are very good at telling me what parts of my games suck. It’s a good relationship.
At the time of this being written, a common response is that people aren’t happy with the way the main character looks, so we’re still working on changing that up. Maybe by the time you read this, it’ll already be switched out.
Anyway, the game is shaping up to be pretty good, so keep an eye out for it when it drops.