We are officially one week from our first major build deadline, and that means one thing -- long days and even longer nights.

I would say that our average nights have been lasting well past 1am for a couple of weeks now, and with our days starting at (roughly) 7am each morning, that makes for very tired designers.  I think I might be getting old, because I remember when 1am wasn't so late!  :)

Our blogs may have suffered recently, but we have been making tremendous strides toward a benchmark build for the game.  From the art/graphics side of the design, we've been moving right along with the fifth creature having been designed and animated (images/animation to be posted soon).  User Interface graphics are coming along nicely, and most of our ingame sound fx will be done after this weekend.  To be honest the gui work has fallen mostly on Andrew, as he codes up the user interface it's been easier for him to layout the screens.  I've just tried to be supportive and supply the occasional graphic icon here and there.  It helps that Andrew has an artist eye and (although he will deny it) plenty of artist skill as well.

The big project, graphically, this week has been the playing fields (levels).  And, as I have mentioned on an almost hourly basis this week, top down graphic design sucks rocks.  When drawing and animating in a pure top down view, you give up most of your usual artistic 'bag of tricks'.  You lose perspective, and with it all definition of height.  Most games simply cheat their top down games into isometric instead of truly dealing with this, but we really wanted to work in a medium that was as pure to top down board gaming as possible -- which we hope will set our game apart from the majority of games out there.

However, the task of creating levels with lots of set pieces, not to mention ground tiles, without any help from a perspective view has caused some of our recent nights to be very long indeed.  It’s funny how ridiculous most objects look when you view them at a pure top down angle. 

One recent example of this was a full night of work devoted to making one of our basic grass tiles look as though the blades were taller.  As mentioned above, height is the hardest thing to relay in this view, and by 1:30am I had just about given up on it after trying everything I could think of to make the grass grow.  Andrew had been helpful, and even tried altering images I sent over to see if we could get the right look… nothing worked.  We finally called it a night with the deep grass issue still unresolved.

The next morning, after a good night sleep, I started playing with brushes in Photoshop at work, and stumbled upon a 'blade of grass' brush.  To make a long story short, after working with that brush and LOTS of filtering, we came up with our deep and full grass tile – everyone is happy.

The moral of the story is:  Staying up late to get more work done must be balanced with a good night’s sleep to produce the best work. 

(Gosh, I sound like my mother)

Jonathan Douglas