Howdy!

Well hello there, it's Allen, and I promise I am not going to patronize you any more about how sorry we are about the slow progress we've been making.

The purpose of the post is just to let everyone know I am getting back to programming. I have been busy for a while and I still haven't quite finished an online class I am in. But the ol' days of C++ have been calling for me for quite a while and today I am going to begin easing myself back to work. I won't be right back in the middle of AST though, I have another project I am going to work on which might be related to the game a bit.

Anyway this marks my return to C++, anything could happen.
-Allen

Long time....no time....

Well hello guys, been awhile eh?

Things have been going very slow here with AST. However there is nothing we can do about that until the beginning of June. This is because of our schedules are very hectic lately. I am in the midst of begging Champlain College for more money, finishing up my senior project, as well as studying for finals. Allen is dealing with a rather large Latin class he has been putting off due to the development of A Shpaians' Tale. He told me he is on Chapter 15 out of 21, and is moving quite fast. I know that Tyler is busy with school and his internship at AMD, so hopefully by June things will calm down in school for all of us, and we can work full time on AST.

Although I am very busy, I have been throwing ideas around in my head for AST, and figured I would share them with you guys and see what you all think:

• Personal story: Your Shapian has their own personal story line throughout the game. This story is generated in a semi-random fashion. You will have a few choices during character creation, which change the generation of your Shapian's story.You story will deal with NPCs in the game, and possibly(I really want) others players as well.
• Binding quests: When you are in  party exploring the wilderness, there is a chance that a random quest will be put upon that party. This quest must be completed to leave the wilderness. As of now, we have come up with one example of this and that is a kidnapping quest. One player would get kidnapped from a group of trolls, or something of that sort. The other players in the party must rescue them, while the kidnapped player tries to escape for them self.
• Retiring: You can have the chance to retire your player, and he will be put into the real world as an NPC. He can give you quests which pertain to your personal story as well. If you retire your player, you clear a character slot in your account, and you can get small perks that you had before in you next character.

These are some of the recent ideas I have come up with, and discussed with some of the team. We want your input as well, so that we can have an idea of how we would implement them, or if we should implement them at all.

That is all for now guys, I will keep the blog updated, and I am going to be doing more Vlog entries covering  things like this as well.

'Till next time, this was your friendly neighborhood game designer,

-Connor

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