Things are still moving along nicely, as far as Once More is concerned.  Music and sound are now up and running!  The sounds aren’t completely tweaked out yet, so some of them aren’t quite perfect, but they’re all at least close.

I had originally thought that Danny B. was going to write the music for the game, but through some miscommunication, it ended up being David Carney that did it instead.  All is well, though–David did a really good job.  You can check out the demo version to hear one of the two songs he put together for the game.  He also handled the sound effects, so double props for David.

We’re continuing to work on the main character, which has proven to be much more difficult than I expected.  The green cyclops guy that’s in the current demo is definitely not going to remain in the game–Once we’ve got his replacement, I’ll put it online.  We’ve got something good going, so hopefully it’ll turn out nicely.

So far, the game has over 50 testers, all of which will be listed in the credits.  If you want to join them in the tester army, try out the demo and give me some feedback.

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.

“Once More” is the working title of the game that I’m putting together now.

Anyone else getting tired of me switching projects?  Yeah, me too.

This one seems very promising.  It uses a mechanic that I’ve seen a few other games use, but I’ve never been totally satisfied with how they used it.  Didn’t flesh it out enough, didn’t expand enough.

Once More is a puzzle game with a heavy focus on narrative.  At this point, you can check out a really early version of it by hitting the tab near the top of the page.  Leave me some feedback in the comments–If you respond to anything in the game (“this level is too hard,” “i like the way this element feels,” “i’ve just discovered how truly shitty a game can be,” etc), I’ll put you in the credits as a tester.  It looks like it’s gonna end up being a big list.  Make sure you leave a name for yourself so I know who to credit.

Oh, be aware that there’s no art at all yet, so it’s all flat colors and rectangles.  Once the game is more or less finished, I’ll find an artist and get all that sorted out.  Until then, I like the idea of this being almost a solo project.