As we all begin the last year of humanity, A Shapian's Tale has reached it's first full year of development! What does this mean for you guys? Well you might see AST out of beta and into release just in time for the apocalypse! I know that doesn't sound all too great, but maybe I can soften the blow with some good news eh?
Well for starters, the ball is finally rolling, and boy is it rolling fast! We are finally geting things setup in Lua, and finishing up the bulk of the C++. So within the coming months you will be playing AST on a frequently updated client. This will not be the Alpha however, we will keep adding features until we are almost ready for Alpha, and then do some closed testing for a little while. Once the closed testing is up, we will release Public Alpha, and you will all start the official story of A Shapian's Tale! In addition to this we are expecting the avatars to be done by the next month according to our Graphic Designer Ed Kulb. Hopefully this meets its deadline and we have the Kickstarter project ready for launch early this year.
Digging a little deeper into the depths of the OverReact game making cave, there has been some recent prototyping for features in AST, one being scroll crafting. Scroll crafting is a type of crafting in which the player places a series of attributes onto a scroll and connects them correctly to make magical scrolls. Below you can see some screenshots of the prototype of the very promising feature in AST.
Many more prototypes will be made as we move on in development (each - including scroll crafting - will have a vlog for an in depth overview), by the time we are ready to actually implement these features we will have a complete understanding of how the mechanics should work. Some of these upcoming prototypes will include mercantile, blacksmithing, carpentry, and also food and recipe crafting. Each of these will be shown in a vlog like what you see above for scroll crafting.
Well I hope this all shined some light on the dreadful fate of humanity, until next time this is your neighborhood friendly game designer,
-Connor Hart
