Friday, November 16, 2012

Slowly reaching the end of the dungeon...

Hi everyone!

It's been again some times since I've post something here and again a lot of exciting things happened since then.

First of all, some of you might have noticed the come-back of Tyler Olsen aka Roots, leader of the Hero of Allacrost project which is, simply put, the base project I took over to start what has become Valyria Tear since then. ;)
Roots already dropped by and offered a kind help by doing some balancing in the game and fixing some little rough edges he saw while playing. I wish him the best for his return and his will to revive Allacrost. I would have, btw, given a link to his blog post but it seems http://www.allacrost.org is down at that very moment.

Speaking of which, Roots asked me whether I could have a look at upgrading a bit the GUI skin to make it a bit different from Allacrost so that both games have clearer identities, and I did. :)
Safir-Kreuz (from Deviant Art) also gave one nice helping hand and finished the new awesome Bronann portrait!!

New GUI skin and new Bronann's portrait :)

Thanks to the unstoppable work of Zabin, the wood tileset saw new additions coming, making possible for me to use new trees within the forest. My goal will then to use them all along the forest maps in the near future.

You might notice new smaller trees around.
On my side, there have been numerous small features additions, bug fixes and overall work on the forest maps. Thus, the forest path has been upgraded up to the first cave path where new puzzles and monsters are awaiting, along with the additions of two new save points.
The first cave part, where you'll have to actually make way. ;)
Note also that the game German translation was kindly updated by NaN, which reported that the items, skills and other global scripts related strings weren't translated even when provided by the translation files. Thanks to his hint about it, I had the necessary test cases needed to fix it. :)

The game in German - with the item names correctly translated.

 As a last note, I shall tell that the dungeons is not very far from being fully done, and thanks to everyone's work around this project, I'm able to officially say that a first Valyria Tear release is planned rather soon, still this year. :)

Stay tuned!