We're definitely working away at super speed these days, heh.
- All 200 spells are fully implemented (except for their damage stats and ammo costs), including something like 90 new animated particles used in particle effects. The final spell roster is a bit different from what I last posted; as implementation finished up, we found ourselves shifting some things to make everything balanced out.
- The new way that the health display works on the HUD is implemented, and I'm really pleased with how that turned out. It's kind of like the health tanks in metroid, except with hearts as the "tanks."
- Keith is tearing through the implementation of all the strategic macrogame/citybuilding stuff, and that's coming along swimmingly.
- I've been working on the physics for the player movement and the enemy movement and all that lately, and I think that's feeling a lot better than it was before. Probably still in for some more tuning, but it's worlds better than it was.
- The art itself is all over the place still in terms of how far along it is, but there's around 3,000 pieces of it so that's understandable. More and more of it is hitting either final quality or beta quality, though, so I'm really excited about that.
- The animations and so forth for the new characters are partially implemented in code, but it's far enough along that I can tell how ridiculously much better these characters look not just in stills but also in motion. That alone really changes the feel of everything.
- We're at somewhere north of 800 "slice" definitions, thanks mainly to Josh and a hardy band of contractors working on these, and what a difference this makes in terms of the feel of the levels, too. Still more to do there, but so far this is panning out exactly as I would have hoped.
- We have an awesome new logo for the sequel, which I'll attach below.
- We've also been having a lot of success making the GUI look tons better, all the way down to the font quality. I've attached a screenshot showing the world map with the isometric tiles (in an early form, some of which are still placeholders -- level up towers, in particular, plus the GUI icons in the upper left), and you can see how awesome the GUI looks from that.
- In general, lots and lots is going on, but because we don't have full screenshots that show beta-quality or final-quality art yet, I've not wanted to share much on that front. We're looking to have the beta out in public early the week of November 12th if at all possible; fingers crossed on that, as we still have tons to do. But it's certainly a feasible goal, rather than an impossible stretch goal, which is nice at least.
