Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Skill animations, short trailer

Today I'm talking about skill animations, last post I talked about the final summon roster.

I was working a long time on special effects for all the skills. The game has 327 unique skills right now and about 300 of those have unique animations. There's also quite a few other incidental effects, like different types of slashes and hit effects, as well as a death animation and enemy swings. For a better idea of what 300 looks like, here's part of my skill checklist I've been using to keep track of which effects I have implemented:
http://i.imgur.com/WK0x2.jpg
And without further ado, here are some special effects in Unity:

http://i.imgur.com/viJ1C.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/nR6UH.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/yeiS2.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Fl2Ef.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/7b9t1.jpg
I also did animations to indicate whose turn it was, and who was being affected by buffs and heals. Before making the game, I didn't realize that the player needed so much feedback. I had to do research when I started getting playtest feedback that the battles weren't clear enough to know everything that was going on.

I also just finished working on the short version of the trailer, so you can see some of the effects in action there.


Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Final summon roster

So this time I'm going to talk about the summon roster.

For the kickstarter backers, the $9000 stretch goal was that the backers would get to vote what the kickstarter exclusive two bonus summons would be. There were quite a bit of objections when I introduced the bonus summons as a stretch goal, especially from backers that only backed at the digital game tier, that it was perhaps unfair to give exclusive content to backers that were backing at the physical game tier. I understood the sentiment, so I added another tier at $15 to get the bonus summons on a digital only level.
The idea with the kickstarter exclusive summons is that backers will get a couple of different looking characters from the beginning of the game, not that they're getting a dramatically different gameplay experience.

TLDR; the bonus summons are mostly eye candy.

Vote Result!
1.) Succubus: 93 - demon woman, focus on charm attacks and debuffs
2.) Dryad: 76 - corrupted tree spirit, focus on healing
3.) Lamia: 60 - snake woman, focus on life draining skills
4.) Rakshasa: 52 - fierce tiger man, focus on illusions and status attacks
5.) Black Cat: 51 - ghostly demon cat
6.) Hellhound: 46 - 3 headed demon dog, focus on physical and fire attacks
7.) Iron Golem: 44 - giant magical construct, focus on physical attacks
8.) Basilisk: 32 - gargantuan snake, focus on physical damage and stone status attacks
9.) Ice Queen: 26 - haughty ice spirit, focus on ice elemental attacks
10.) Gargoyle: 21 - demon made of stone, focus on physical damage

So the final result for the identity of the two bonus summons is the Succubus and the Dryad. Looks like everybody really likes the girls. Though, it makes me glad that all the summons were interesting enough to get a considerable margin of support.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Kickstarter campaign results

To start off with, I thought I'd do a post summing up how the kickstarter campaign concluded.
At the kickstarter's completion, Paper Sorcerer hit a total of eight stretch goals:

$5500, An extra summon,the Living Doll, with bonus levels

$8,000, Unity Pro, and another desktop wallpaper

$8500 Every box copy signed

$9000 Vote on the two bonus summons

$9500 A new skin for the main character

$10,000 A new summon, the Giant and bonus levels and enemies.

$12,000 Every backer gets a beta to playtest

$13,000 every backer's name will appear in-game, in The Tome of Heroes


And at conclusion, the kickstarter reached a total of $13,151 in funding! Thanks so much to all the backers on kickstarter, I'm still amazed by how much funding Paper Sorcerer received.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Paper Sorcerer trailer, blog resuming updates

Hi guys, it's been awhile.
Since I haven't updated the blog in so long, I thought that I'd try to catch up with the updates on kickstarter by mirroring the backer updates, with edits and extras here. So you'll be seeing the blog here updating more consistently until the game's release.

My news for today is the trailer is finished!
Here it is in all its glory:


That's all for today. Next time, I'll summarize how the kickstarter campaign concluded.
Thanks for reading!