Well, I am forced to delay the release of the forums because of technical issues. Also, there will be no updates to the site over the next week because I am going away on vacation. I will be able to work on the game while on vacation so when I get back I will report the progress in development. Beyond that, there is not much to say except goodbye until next Saturday.

Tyler Dodge

--Warning below is some semi-technical information about the game

Well, today I am going to talk more about the technical side of the game. It utilizes an engine called TBFE which was written in C++. You probably have not heard of TBFE, considering I wrote it specifically for this game. TBFE stands for Tile Based Farming Engine, one of my usually creative names. It has a scripting language embedded in it called Lua. Lua is a free, lightweight scripting language that has been used in some big name games, such as Crysis, World of Warcraft, and Supreme Commander.

The library I use to render everything to the screen is SDL. A great feature of SDL and Lua is that they are cross platform. This is useful because I do most of my work in the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. Therefore, I can easily port my code to Windows, which I assume most of Agrarious's users will be using.

--Technical area ends here.

As many of you know, the game is a farming game. It draws inspiration from other farming games, but by and large it is unique. The game will feature a mystery storyline, involving the murder of someone the main character know. The storyline will be progressed mainly through choice based cutscenes. There will be multiple endings to the story and you will be able to continue playing the game past the completion of the story.

Agrarious will feature some RPG elements, one being a leveling system. Also, there are various stats that go down over the course of the day, these include hunger, thirst, and energy. It will not take very long to refill these stats, however, they are in place so that the player driven economy works.

In site news, the forums and an account system will be launched either today or tomorrow.

Well below is my new base model for the player. Feel free to send me any constructive criticism you have about the picture.

As I'm reaching the final stages of development (hopefully), I have decided to begin a blog dedicated to the game's development

Over the course of the last few days, I have been working on redrawing the character models. Previously, I had just drawn them pixel by pixel, however, they did not fit in well with the rest of the art. To explain, the majority of the art used in Agrarious is being created in blender, which gives it a slight 3D look. Furthermore, the character sprites are not at the same angle as everything else in the game, which makes them appear even more flat.

Below is some art at the various stages of development

There is quite a change between the stages as you can see. Stage 1 was still one of my pixel by pixel drawings. While stage 2 was a blender model. The difference between stages 2 and 3 is I made it so blender treated the shirt as a cloth rather than a static mesh. I think it turned out pretty well. Hopefully, I won't find it necessary to completely redo the sprite again.

One useful thing about this change is now I can create new animation relatively quickly compared to the pixel by pixel model. With the original model, I would have to redraw everything. With this model, I just reposition a few vertices. Well, now it's time to finish the rest of the models and assemble them. Tomorrow, I will put up a finished model and actually talk about code.

Tyler Dodge

Well, we can all safely say goodbye to this guy