Work work work....

Hello everyone!

It has been awhile since i have spoken here.....almost 3 weeks in fact O_O

Well either way, Allen has been covering things on the blog pretty nicely, good job. I have been quite busy outside of AST, recently was accepted to Champlain College for their Game Design major. And I have to pay some deposits before the 1st of May.

However, I do always find time to come on, and see how the tech demo is looking. And it seems to be going well. You may be thinking to yourself "How so? You missed your deadline 2 weeks ago! D:" but I am very aware of the deadline we missed. However, we are still making the game even though we are 2 weeks off. Allen is in the process of rewriting some of the fundamental parts of our engine, but the sooner we do this, the less of a chance we miss more deadlines. He seems to be working rather quickly, and we are hoping to have everything working the way it should soon. We do have something playable....well......something working. I wouldn't call it "playable" since the amount of lag really makes things next to impossible to play. So these rewrites and fixes will really make things work the way we intended them to.

On the graphics side of things, we did finished the logo! :D check it out:

We will be making a few tweaks, but this is mainly what the logo will look like. It took a while to get thigns right, and we are very satisfied. However we would like if you told us what you think, so please leave a comment below!

With that I say, Hasta Luego!

-Connor

Lazy Week

Hey guys it's Allen again... so, it's nearly been a week since we pulled our heart breaking April Fools joke. For those of you who missed it, sorry, forgot to post it on the blog. We made a fake demo and rick roll'd a lot of fans on the yoyogames forums. The truth is a real demo is still just getting ready. We have a little something, but it is still very buggy, and some of the engine concepts appear to need some tweaking. We aren't going to release anything until we're satisfied with our work.

I am personally on vacation in Boston this week. So I have been forcing myself to stay off of the work... I love the game, but I don't wish to be a workaholic. I decided the least I could do is keep in touch with everyone. I will be back into the normal work schedule in just a few days, and who knows when the real demo will actually be read then. Again if you haven't already accepted the request to join my mailing list all official testing will happen through that mailing list.

Finally I would like to address an issue I think I have noticed. I was browsing around on kickstarter and realized I hadn't seen any successful MMO games. I searched it, and of the four projects three are failed, and one is going to fail in about nine days. The second part of the issue is this: Our game is all about team work at it's core. It's not going to work if you don't have people there to play with you. So for those two reasons, I compel you! If you know anyone who likes games, or MMOs, or whatever other reason you can think to love A Shapians Tale, point us out! Theoretically, if everyone reading this right now told just one friend to check out the blog. The entire community could suddenly double in size. It's that simple.

"Just some poorly articulated thoughts, written at midnight."

By Allen Webster

A Shapian Launch

Hey guys what's up? Allen here and I am going to give you the break down about what's coming up.

The second poll is up and it looks like we'll be releasing a public demo tomorrow. After that all of our specially selected testers are going to begin testing the game development from there until... well the next public demo. The demo will be linked to here, and on the yoyogames forums.

Which reminds me to say, testers, if you receive a mailing list invite to my email address (yoyo4thdimetion@gmail.com) accept it. That is the mailing list for our testers only. We will be distributing closed testing files through that email. Please don't leak it all! We're trusting you guys!

We'll be using this as the game chat until we make in game chatting.
http://mibbit.com/?channel=%23AST&server=irc.slashnet.org

Can't wait to see everyone that shows up for the demo! It's almost here now, getting excited would be appropriate.

-Allen

And that makes 10!

Hello!

As always we have some more good news for overreact, and AST! Today we got another programmer on the team! His name is Mike VanDetta, he is currently working on applications such as level editors, item editors, ect. With him on the team, it puts our number into the double digits! We are very glad that he is on the team, as it will save us time and frustration with the level editor that will be needed soon.

So, in other news, we are getting the list together for the testing team! As of now, we have 32 testers and we are hoping to reach 50, if not, then 35 is the cap.The demo should be ready by Thursday, if not Wednesday. The demo won't be the best show off for everything the game has to offer, this is merely just testing physics, networking, and some other small things. As April progresses, so will AST as it moves towards a complete demo. As for "testing physics" you will be pushing blocks around with your friends, and i figured I would get onto making those today, this is my progress thus far:

Well i hope you guys like what you see so far! the other should be done by the end of the night, which reminds me....I need to get back to work!

See ya guys!

-Connor

Vlog007 -- Graphics progress

Hello everyone!

Yesterday, I released a vlog covering the progress of the graphics, the recent poll's results and the new poll. I Also went over some important info on the demo, and what you will see next week. So check it out, drop a comment, and a thumbs up!

In other news, I will be posting some more art for you guys to see, as well as some news with our progress on launching out kickstarter video!

Until next time,

-Connor

Vlog05 posted! Story time!

Hey, guys. It's me, Yanssel (yes, that's my actual name!), the writer for A Shapian's Tale. I know that I'm probably one of the lesser informing members of the team, and I'm trying to change that. So, in an attempt to redeem myself from giving you a lack on information, I've uploaded a video!

Ooo, that's a lovely picture... I'll have to change that.

Anyway, that's pretty much everything there is to know about the story for now. Later on, I plan on revealing small things such as how certain story-affected gameplay-aspects will be run. For now, I hope this video will make up for my absence from giving you info!

-Yanssel

Kickstarter approved!

Hello all!

Sorry for such a delay in our posting, we have been very busy with so many things! We have some great news, and some bad news as well. The bad news isn't actually so bad, as it has made us think of what our future will be as a indie game team. So lets start with that shall we!

The bad:

Recently, Indie-Fund release their funding terms to the public, and we immediately read them line after line until we found something bad. And after I thought everything was fine and dandy, our writer John, came across a line which changed our minds about applying for indie-fund...

"You are an actual company"

After I was told that we needed to be an actual company, some thoughts ran through the head of the team. Should we turn OverReact into an official company? We pondered over this for a good amount of time, before we came to the decision that we would not apply for Indie-Fund. However, we do want to turn OverReact in an official company this summer, or some time after. So there is SOME good that came out of this semi-bad news!

The Good:

Now to pick up your spirits, we do have some very great news for the team and AST! Our original graphic artist Zach Barnett was suppose to be doing all the graphics for AST, however he has been busy with a project which he started before joining the team. So with this news, we searched for another artist to join the team to replace his spot on the project(not the team, he is still here).

We found a guy named Cameron Erickson who we have known for a little over 2 years now. It took me a week to realize he would be perfect for the job, so I asked him if he would join just a few days ago, and he gladly accepted. Since then he has completed the Leunamme circles basic movement animations, edited the blog icons(look at around!), and is now working on the logo for the game; we are very glad to have him on the team, and hope it stays that way.

In other great news! We submitted our Kickstarter project, and it has recently received approval by the administrators! We are very excited to launch the project, however we need to make a video, and set up our backer rewards. Also, after finding out that Luke's server can hold up to millions of users, we lowered our amount of needed funding($20,000) to $6,000, an amount we can all wrap our heads around. This funding will go towards all the equipment on the team. It will help me purchase a new laptop, so i can get off of vista, and stop propping my headphone jack with a AA battery. Also it will help Patrick get a working keyboard(musical keyboard), and some better sound equipment. And just help the team with whatever else we need to complete this project.....like John's golden 2B pencil....

As for AST, we have a good bit of news there as well! Patrick has made a few theme songs for the game, which are godly as ever. Allen and Tyler have been working on the engine and the networking and should be testing it all by the end of this weekend! And as usual, I have been pumping out some epic concept art to help Cameron with his awesome vector animations. We are on schedule(hopefully), and should be ready to release when we planned!

So as you can see there has been a lot happening with the team and AST. We are working hard to make you guys happy, and hopefully our next post will announce the launch of our Kickstarter project, and some more great news on AST!

I know this is all so stressful, but it will all pay off in the end!

-Connor