Zania dev journal day 11

According to my backup logs, this is the 11th day that I have been working on the game called Zania. No thanks to the financial crisis, I had to put this project in limbo for a while, no more. Wow, it seems like only yesterday that I was still struggling with the physics engine, today it has expanded to involve so much. At the latest tally, I am at around 5000 lines of code.

A lot of thinking went into the architecture of code, interaction between classes, but more time is spent on the art direction. I have an idea of where I want to go, but I never put anything down to say that this is it.

Graphics

Graphical style is going to be a very colorful background in combination with a black foreground. This frees me of the pain of drawing everything in detail while leveraging my already existing skills in photoshop. I can basically just convert photos of real life objects into pure black instead of drawing them. Of course, the style is still steam punk, but drawing inspiration from Braid and this picture.

Voice acting

I think I found a quick, dirty and cheap way to get voice acting in the game to move the story along. The result is something like this:

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Transcript: Scanners indicates an energy build up near the last known location of the alien vessels. Dispatching scouts ..

It was a great learning experience playing around with voice. It’s not as straight forward as I thought. Of course, you can probably tell that Karen Sjet’s voice has severe influence in the voice acting. It took me several tries and rewrites to get the tone and feeling right. Who knew that a slight difference in grammar structure can convey a different personality.

Contents

I will have to cut down the content of the first release significantly.  Although the underlying architecture and design choices are made to be able to  scale up to a massive world, I decided that it’s best to test out the idea  first and see if it catches on. On that note, I am at a loss as to what part of Zania I should be presenting.  Preferably the combats, but what type of combat will catch the audience’s  fancy? I am not sure. That’s the part I have to leave to the audience to decide.

Music

I’ve made no progress in music so far. Kind of sad. Hopefully next time I update, I will have a playable demo. A playable demo will include graphics, music, sound, working physics and a functional ship that can be blown up.