It Just Didn’t Seem Right

I’ve shown the rough artwork for this bit of promotional material to a few of those closest to me, but it’s been a long month and I figured my readers would like some indication what is going on in the world of Shadowdawn: Genesis.  Granted, I haven’t formally introduced the other 5 characters in this portrait yet, but as I finish prettying this up by fixing some lines and details and splashing it with colors and a proper background, I’ll make an effort to update the character profiles on the website for everyone.  I’ve been refining my style more and more, so it’s going to be exciting to finally share the finished portrait artwork with you all.

So I am in the process of finishing the entire game’s script, which was a project I took pretty far earlier this year.  After hearing some feedback from my casual editors and realizing a certain main character wasn’t getting as involved as they needed to be, I discovered a need to add a whole other area to the game.  Granted, I’ve been actively avoiding MacGuffin hunts as this is a very character relationship-driven game unlike most RPGs, so I wouldn’t be adding a whole new area if I didn’t need to just to pad out the length.  So rest assured, this addition to the script is necessary to make the story flow just the way it needs to!

Once the script is complete and locked down, I’m going to lay out the skeleton framework for the entire game’s explorable area.  I’ve decided to try another approach to finishing this project; I would normally just draw what I want and then find a place to put it in, but I’m going to use the more professional and modern game design approach of outlining the areas and then filling them up with art as needed.  It’s easier to see what you actually need and go from there, rather than guess and waste time anticipating things that may actually have no use in the final product.  This will also let me put placeholder NPC blocks and code the script into them, so that all I need to do is drop the artwork on top of them and not worry about adding the dialog later.

Such is the month of August!  September should be a bit more exciting as far as development news goes, as my base of operations has moved to a much more comfortable setting. As you may have noticed I’ve been purposely avoiding screenshots because a lot is in-progress, but the new character sprites are coming along nicely.  I can’t wait to share them with you.