Hello all!

With our first Alpha Demo complete and uploaded here on itch.io, I'm going to be doing a follow up to my retrospective post from April, which is hosted on our Wordpress site. This month, I'll be talking about the future of the project in terms of art development, as well as discussing how our workflow will continue to adapt as Drifter Dynasty edges ever closer to completion. 

Recently, Eric and I decided to perform a small experiment. I was given the task to complete as many animations as possible during a week long period, and time myself doing so. Though I will not share the exact results of the experiment, I will say that by doing this we have established a baseline for how quickly certain assets can be generated. As I've mentioned in past entries, animation is a hefty, time consuming task. We've worked hard to establish a workflow for animating character sprites and that rhythm will certainly serve us well as we continue to work on this project.

We have a second Alpha Demo scheduled to be released this summer, which will hopefully encompass the majority of the game’s Prologue Chapter. As much of the character and environmental design for this section is done, animation will likely be my main focus during the next couple of months. We currently plan to include four playable characters in this demo, all of which will need a walk cycle and multiple combat animations at minimum. Though this may seem like a daunting task, thankfully, the majority of the work consists of applying what we have already learned and created to new situations.

Aside from animation, I’ll also be continuing to work on the UI, as well as tweaking existing assets. We’ve recently reworked some gameplay aspects and these changes will need to be reflected in the interface. We also hope to animate certain UI elements, so that they are no longer static images pasted on top of the environment, but an active part of the game’s flow. I’ll be working closely with Eric during this phase of development to make sure that the placement and presentation of the assets on screen is up to snuff. 

Though much of the work we have planned for the coming months is somewhat repetitive, we look forward to the release of the second Alpha Demo and the immense amount of effort that it will represent. Once complete, we will move on to the next phase of development, which will be the beta release.

Thank you and we hope that you all stick around to see it come to fruition!