Hey everyone, sorry to have been so quiet lately! Barely have time to pop in to TouchArcade and read the major articles and approve new developers in the private forum these days Good news is, that the reason for my lack of time is I've been busy on Spirit Hunter Mineko! I've enlisted the help of yet another artist who was actually working on animations for my *next, next game* (coming after Mineko and Rogue Touch EX... yes I am planning and working that far ahead ) to rework the control and interface ideas further. He has been quite helpful in overhauling my user interface designs, and Mineko will be a much better game for it! Now the UI elements are minimal when exploring, showing only basic health/magic status (even blending into the iPhone status bar), but character details, inventory, and anything else you want is easy to access if you need it... One of the good things about having so much time to work on Mineko is a chance to review and refine my plans as I go every month or so. If I'd belted this thing out shortly after my first cave video tests the visuals would have sucked, the gameplay would have been too derivative, and it would have been quickly forgotten. An example: Since I spend a lot of my time tweaking the random level generators and re-exploring the areas that are created, I felt that the world needed a bit more life and some special little touches added to it. I've been hard at work to that end... creating new tiles, particle effects, weather, and little critters that inhabit different areas you travel through. Even though Mineko is turn based these things make the world feel much more alive an interesting! Another example: My earlier plans for magic system sounded pretty cool, but in practice they stunk. Trying to integrate a sort of card-enhanced battle system works great in CARD based strategy games, not dungeon crawlers... Or at least not in the world of Mineko. The concept just didn't fit well enough with the rest of the game and equipment so I had to go back to the old drawing board! Now your movement, abilities, items, and magic use are more carefully laid out and balanced against each other. They are easier to get at and control as well, a big win I'd like to produce another demo video in the near future, but want to get a few things closer to completion first. Especially want to finish the new UI and get some awesome music in place at the minimum... Will share some still shots and more details on the new monsters, magic, UI, and all that fun stuff Real Soon Now(TM).
The soul crystal/cards concept sounded fun but, yeah, you can only take it so far so I'm very curious to hear about your NEW Magic/Skill system plans!
I agree, the cards did sound fun in our early discussions, but in full-on game simulations it was ugly- too many odd rules that had to be made surrounding them that didn't pertain to other equipment. Then there were the issues with display, selection, and use of cards in a way that felt natural and didn't add a lot of buttons to the screen. Finally, it just failed to fit the game world well enough: "Oh hey, every good spirit hunter carries a deck of cards with them!"... Bleh. Spirit Hunter Mineko is not meant to be a realistic RPG, but it was just too inconsistent with the rest of the magic items and story... and felt like it was tacked on. Collecting and possibly trading "spirit cards" was probably the only really cool feature of this ill-fated idea that people would miss... The drive to collect was so interesting, I am doing my best to make sure it will live on in a different way. --- For everyone else that responded recently- I'm very glad to know there are people still interested in Mineko and my whereabouts. Yep, Isilel, I am alive and doing better than ever! Bit off a bit more than I could chew last year with a ton of consulting work... that put the breaks on game development. But slowing down had an advantage- the resulting game you end up playing will be so much better. Some of the ideas and design changes that have been made in the last month or two blow my mind in their simplicity and elegance Anyway, I think at the very least I owe a couple of screen shots until I can make a new video, so watch this space
Haha, that is great stuff! Love Futurama, and the "eye-phone" episode was indeed a funny one I've been pretty quiet here again, and apologize for that! So in return for the good laugh given from a picture, I'll post a picture. This image gives you a bit of info on one aspect of the magic/items system in Spirit Hunter Mineko... Alchemy! Potions will be useful in a lot of situations, so they get a dedicated section in the user interface for easy access There are many hidden aspects of the game's tactics you can't see from the sample pic, some involving other forms of magic and spirit energy as well. (speaking of which, ignore the numbers on the bar graphs for HP and SP at the top of the screen, they are placeholders and quite inaccurate since the bar graphs are full ) Sorry for playing coy with the single teaser pic, but there will be much more info coming here in this thread, as well as my own website... ChronoSoft.com is getting an overhaul/redesign right now that I hope to launch in March. Optimistically, Spirit Hunter Mineko could get finished and released this spring if my consulting business permits. That would mark about 1.5 years of part time development by me, which must be some sort of record in iPhone games (perhaps rivaled only by Madgarden's infamous 6 month long update cycles for Sword of Fargoal )
Hey there everyone! I know Vovin's been picking on me, and certainly I admit the development time for Mineko has far exceeded my plans. If only I'd been able to work on this full time... the lament of the indie developer with a day job (or consulting business in my case)! I'm doing what I can to have some very interesting stuff to show off at WWDC next month in San Francisco... with a release coming after that. How soon depends on my consulting workload and how little sleep I can survive on For those who might not have noticed, the ChronoSoft website has gotten a complete makeover: http://www.ChronoSoft.com I've started a blog in which there will be updates on all my games in progress, and created landing pages for Spirit Hunter Mineko and Rogue Touch. Other games will join that list as soon as I decide I'm ready to share... probably not until after the next Rogue Touch update and Mineko are ready to go Believe me, I am very eager to finish and release Spirit Hunter Mineko. I've been working on multiple fronts to ensure this is an amazing experience. Core gameplay has been evolving continuously toward perfection, better visuals are being added regularly... Plus I have started trying to create an actual brand here! Updated my website as mentioned, picked up some domain new names that will help, and even having some t-shirts made up for WWDC (which may be made available to others if they are well liked). Sorry it's taken so long to get this far in development. I'm just one guy wearing about 17 different hats. And the weight of them is giving me a headache ---- JoshCM- You made me laugh out loud! Yeah, I have been paying attention to large and small details. Maybe too much attention. Clouds, flying critters, and even the character casting proper, animated shadows... lots of stuff that you can't see from this older photo. Still lacking in important areas at the moment, but I'm dedicated to making this great!
