Journal

Another member of our team has been hard at work over the last few weeks to create unique pixel art for all of the various equipment throughout Last Dream II. A small subset of that equipment, specifically a few selected swords, is shown in the image. The swords include the Cursed Sword, Demonic Sword, and Dragon Sword (from left to right).

This art will be used to show the weapon and shield currently equipped by the player. You may have noticed ...

Another item on the to-do list for the Hunter’s prologue is creating the Hunter’s battle sprite. This includes the idle animation that plays while the Hunter is waiting to act. The completed Hunter’s idle animation is shown above. We still have to create special animations for the Hunter’s skills as well as a completely new animation for her attack with a bow since the normal “swinging” animation used by other characters who use a sword/axe won’t work.

We’re moving closer to ...

This is video post this time so that we can adequately capture the Hornet idle animation – another enemy from the Hunter Prologue’s first dungeon – the Southern Dryades Forest. The hornet is composed of 25 separate individual pieces that can rotate around relative to the body or the joint that they connect to. There are 4 wings, 6 legs (each composed of 3 segments), as well as the head, body, and stinger.

One of the promises of the Last Dream ...

This post is a bit different than others. My wife has crocheted small figurines/dolls  (~4 inches tall) of each Last Dream II character class and I wanted to take this opportunity to show them off. The above screenshot shows the White Mage (Elizabeth), the Berserker (Lief), the Summoner (Freya), and the Engineer (Copernicus). At this point, all character classes except the Knight (Tiberius) have been completed.

Currently, these are very limited edition (only one doll exists per character class) but we’ve ...

One of the required elements for the Hunter’s Prologue first dungeon is animating the enemies. The above screenshot shows the Nepenthes – created by our very talented graphic artist (https://twitter.com/UncleBladey). The process of animating each enemy requires separating the enemies into their individual pieces – in this case that means each leaf, tentacle, and the body – so that we can move each piece separately.

At this point, we’ve created the “idle” animation which is used when ...

We’re excited to have finished off the introductory cutscene for the Hunter’s prologue. It focuses in the friendship between the young huntress, Atalanta, and the village elder, Ignatius. We don’t want to give away too much but we think it ties nicely with the Knight’s prologue. 

We’ve also wrapped up adding all of the treasures, hidden items, NPCs, and interactive environment for the village of Greenwater. With that complete, we’re transitioning to the first dungeon – the Southern Dryades Forest. There’s ...

After finishing up the Hunter’s roaming sprite, we’ve moved onto mapping the primary town in the Hunter’s prologue – Greenwater Village. This has required creation of new art, especially pine trees, log cabin walls, and some new plants unique to Greenwater and the surrounding areas. The exterior of Greenwater Village is now complete and we’re moving onto the building interiors and the Hunter’s prologue first dungeon – Southern Greenwater Forest.

We’re excited that the mapping is going quickly and we anticipate ...

This last week, our team met to test both the Knight and Gray Mage’s prologue. It was a very successful game testing session with many of the major game-breaking bugs having been fixed and a much more enjoyable experience with auto-saves enabling testers to lose little to no progress if/when major issues were encountered. There are, of course, still many bugs as shown above in the Item Menu screenshot which highlights a bug where items with zero quantity still briefly ...

One of the new improvements that we’ve added in Last Dream II is the enemy AI system which allows enemies to choose their actions based on predetermined conditions. We’ve barely scratched the surface so far, but it was a significant rewrite of the battle system source code to implement the framework to allow for the enemy AI. At this point, we’re only using the enemy AI in one place in the game (the boss of the Knight’s prologue), but it ...