I figured that some folks around here might be interested in this. It took me about two and a half days of solid work last week to compile this, as well as culling out old and unused graphics, determining new needs, etc. The attached spreadsheet has all the details on exactly what is going to be changed or added, in waaaay more details than most people would be interested in. But since some people likely would be interested, here it is!
A few things I suppose I'll call your attention to:
1. There's a few new buildings being added, to round out the time periods that had a paucity of buildings (or wholly inappropriate building types) compared to other time periods.
2. One new character will be added.
3. All characters will have two portrait variants, instead of some having 3-4 variants but most only having 1 variant as now.
4. Character attacks, ducks, jumps, and falls will be multi-frame rather than single-frame, making them considerably smoother than now without going crazy. Additionally, there will be both walk and run frames for characters, so no more "power walking" as villagers walk around the settlement. This will also make it so that we may tweak your acceleration a bit when you move, so you start off briefly walking and then transition into a longer run -- that's something we'll have to experiment with what makes sense. Previously I couldn't do that because it would make your character seem to slide over the ground, but that style of momentum movement might actually feel better to play with and certainly will make smaller adjustments to your position easier to make.
5. Contrary to what I'd originally planned, we are going to redo the entire GUI styling yet again, and we're also going to redo all the item and ability icons.
6. The edges of grounds are going to look much more unique and varied, which I'm excited about. Hanging roots and lower grass and rocky cliff sides and whatever else the artists can come up with. The point is that it won't just be grass all the way around anymore, and also the grass usually won't be so tall (or might be behind the player from now on) to make it so that you aren't constantly losing small items in the grass.
7. Not quite all the monsters are being redone, but a huge majority of them are. In all its 63 new monster designs, a few of which are variants of one another. But even for things like the dark dragon versus the crippled dragon, I'm going for entirely unique types of dragons rather than just a recolor. When it comes to the espers, those will become humanoid rather than the "floating balls of light" that people have complained about.
8. When it comes to miscellaneous small objects (aka destructible stuff) and trees, quite a few new things are being added in addition to what is being reskinned. All that new stuff there may very well not be ready by the 2.0 relaunch, which would be fine, but the new stuff would come shortly after that instead.
9. The world map is going to be completely redone in a fashion that should -- knock on wood -- look night and day different from what it ever has before. I think we'll be able to come up with something that looks a lot more compelling and natural than the overly grid-like one we currently have.
10. When it comes to a lot of the monsters, by the way, many of them are being scaled down. This is for gameplay reasons just as much as it is for reducing art costs. To be honest, the reason a lot of the monsters were so large in the first place was because my old style of art simple did not look as good when scaled down. That won't be the case with the new art. Large monsters are problematic because they can be so large that they only are ever offscreen while you are fighting them if you are keeping a safe distance. So then you don't even see them! Secondarily, large monsters are easier to "spray and pray" against -- since they are so big, anything aimed in their general direction will hit them. Thirdly, the larger the monsters are compared to you, the more doll-like your character starts to feel. Fourth, larger monsters have more trouble getting through a lot of the terrain that your character can easily navigate, giving them enormous tactical disadvantages and encouraging our reliance on things like homing fire, etc, which can follow you even when the monster can't. That's not to say there will be no oversized monsters -- t-rexes and overlords and a few others need to be huge, but the overlords will be sized down to more the size of the rex rather than 4x the size of the rex. That makes them still 16x the size of the players.
11. In all, this is a 293
million pixel project.
Anyway, at this point Heavy Cat Studios are rallying their troops, organizing the work on their end, coordinating with me, etc. There are going to be at least four artists working on this fulltime starting this week, and they've been working on double-checking all my work and making sure that they understand the scope and bounds of the final work (I just did get them the massive document and final files to go through very late on Friday).
So that's where things are at the moment -- exciting time! Figured folks might be curious what has been going on behind the scenes with this project lately.
