We have advanced on defining a process for Level Design, I also gave a first look at the dungeon layout for Covetous. We are using a lot of information from the excellent Codex Wiki. All will be posted in the design repo (specifically, in the wiki)
Team building goes on, so far we have contacted the following:
Level Design
Orlando Mendez, an architect from Chile.
Ryan Szrama: Has volunteered as a backup
Graphics
Mike Mann, who showed up some cool portfolio pieces, specially for non-pixel art. He also showed us some low res pixel art.
Star Dstroyher – For whom we don’t have a portfolio link yet
Website
Ryan Szrama: Can help us setup a drupal website and has also offered to maintain the site on his hosting platform
We’ll be reviewing the sound portfolios and rounding up the graphics part which is crucial to get things going. The plan is to have first level of the dungeon covetous and retrofit the design process.
Just to clarify, this is a fan project, not commercial in any sense, plus there is no payment involved of any kind.
Exodus Destiny continues working on the engine for Britannian Underworld; he’s released a new version of his alpha including floor/ceiling texture casting as well as angled walls, both changes make dungeons look much better and allow more freedom for the level designers.
He’s also been tinkering with different kind of traps, like trap floors and flooding rooms.
We have been contacted by some graphics and sound designers, I’ll soon be posting the first listing of required assets so we can start defining the team.
As for levels, we have defined the following parameters so far:
Size: 64×64
Three layer of tiles (ground, ceiling and main map)
Britannia: the Age of Enlightenment has begun, millions of individuals embark into The Quest of the Avatar, but only one will succeed. The Ultimate challenge lies underground in the dungeons of virtue scattered on the Britannian mainland and islands… deep in the bowels of the land lie the stones of virtue, invaluable artifacts needed to get the Key of Three Parts and reach the definitive piece of knowledge: The Codex of Ultimate Wisdom.
Explore the dungeons of Britannia like you have never done before, welcome to the Britannian Underworld.
And so, another fun project begins… development will be led by Jucarave, a.k.a. Exodus Destiny Dragon, who has already crafted an initial version of the raycasting engine that you HAVE to check out (Use enter to interact with things and WASDQE to move around
Read onward, because we are gonna need your help.
Deceit, the cursed prison
The game will be a light-plot action RPG in the veins of Ultima Underworld, where you will have to explore the different levels, solving puzzles and riddles and vanquishing powerful enemies, to find the six stones of virtue and finally hitting the Stygian Abyss to become teh Avatar. Think of it as a 3D U4 remake, without the overworld and the virtue stuff (noone cares about that, right 😀 )
The first phase of the project will be assembling a powerful team; we are looking for the following virtuous individuals:
Pixel artist(s): We are aiming to have a wolf-3d like engine; we will need:
64×64 sprites for the environment
Props for the different levels
Animated sprites for the enemies (also 64×64)
Sprites for items, including paperdoll
User interface
Cutscenes
Level designer(s): We are looking forward to create 8 dungeons, each one with 8 levels with puzzles and dangers. This is a critical part of the project and should be pretty fun! The idea is to get inspiration from the original dungeons but make them much more interesting, imagine you are playing a mix of UW and U4 :).
Some constraints apply here: The engine we are creating is on par of Wolfenstein 3D; that means levels should be single depth, and build around a grid, interaction will also be keyboard only probably. Details will be supplied.
Sound Effects Designer: To design the sound effects.
Music Composer: Ambient music similar to Ultima Underworld.
Graphics Artists: To create art for the website
Website designer: To create the website for the project including
The game will be Open Source, and accessible online via any decent browser.
My role in the project will be more that of sticking things together as well as the coding required for that; that means this is more of a project of Exodus Destiny, who will be handling most of the actual game coding, the reason for this is (you guess it) I have got enough projects already 🙂
(Note that the current version of the demo works better on firefox, because Chrome doesn’t love pixelmen and IE.. what’s IE?)
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