Gonna let the dust settle....

Velociryx · May 9, 2003, 22:34

Whew.....that was one vicious lotta posting all at once!

And now that I've gotten a few more goodies from "there to here" so to speak, I think I'll sit back a while and see what sorts of comments they bring, and as always, they are WELCOMED! This is OUR game.....a community effort. TONS of fantastic game ideas were drawn straight from this forum in our various discussions, and we have no intention of stopping that process during the entire life of the game (and may she have a long lifespan indeed!)

So feel free! Comment, discuss, or heap praises on the talented folks who have stepped forward to give generously of their time and abilities to take the long journey with me of breathing life into Candle'Bre!

-=Vel=-

PS: Anybody still think we're dead?

moomin · May 10, 2003, 09:54

Some great stuff there, Vel. I'm much impressed by the overall quality of the graphics - some of it puts commercial games with fat development budgets to shame.

I'll try to be useful by offering some individual comments below:

The strategic map is quite beautiful. While I don't like the EU style myself - played EU a lot and got burned out with the excessive micromanagement, which colors my opinion - it's well done, clearly compartementalized and cheerily colorful. About the only thing I can think of is that the blue faction looks a lot like the lake - although that supposedly won't be a problem once that map burns itself onto your retina. I like how you avoided having it too realistic - it has a great table-top game feeling right now.

I really, really like your buildings and province zoom-in. Some serious talent displayed there, by whoever did those. It looks friendly, welcoming and forcibly reminds me of classics such as SimCity and CTP. Again, I appreciate you didn't fall into the trap of trying for photo realism. It's certainly a lot better than the patetic city view of Civ3 already!

Menus and screens are now coming along very nice, with a coherent, stylish look to them. However, there's always the danger of looking a bit off when elements of different sophisitication are mixed on a page: in the espionage screen, the slightly corroded dagger is excellent - which emphasizes that the poision - it is poision, right? - looks a lot like play-doh.

The concept sketches are very fine indeed - I hope you find some way to fit them into the game. Moody and beautiful, avoiding corny over-used effects such as lens flares. Great stuff.

I sounds didn't do much for me, but I expect it varies wildly. Mostly I think it was because I was annoyed by that low-key jazz drum featured in the background in most of them. I like my drums as a center piece, as it were, or not at all. Consequently I like the battle theme, where the music flows nicely around real drumming the best.

Oh, and I'm sure MarkG will be happy to see Macedonia got it's own battle standard

Overall, this is great stuff, showing tremendous promise. I'm temepted to tell you to lay of the graphics now and go concentrate on the gameplay, since what you have shown here would suffice for at least two fine games already.

Good work!

Velociryx · May 10, 2003, 10:18

Hiya Moomin! And I'm glad you like what we've got so far!

The province-style map is actually a very new idea (all our previous pre-screenies had featured tiled graphics), but I have to admit, I'm diggin' it! And, we're preserving all the tiled graphics work for use in the province view screens, so we'll still be using 100% of the stuff that our combined efforts have produced!

Agree on the blue faction, btw....I guess that's one thing that it'll take a working prototype to know for sure, but I suspect that changing the shading slightly is not gonna be tough.

And not to worry.....the graphics guys are different folks from the ones doing the code work, and that is continuing hand-in-hand with our pretty pictures (the pictures, btw, are largely brought to you by Hex and BustaMike, with Cyclo, me, Wenchy, Gasdd, and Chowlett (I don't think I forgot anybody) chipping in variously on the spell images. It's just that....until we can mesh the innards with the graphics properly, we don't really have much to show, where code is concerned. There's a lot of it there, and our main focus at this point is merging the two together.

So....we might be a little slower than we'd hoped, but we're definitely trying to make it the very best we can, and I hope that our efforts to date demonstrate that we're not going to settle for anything less. The one thing we don't want to do is to put out an inferior or disappointing product. When you guys get it, you'll get it knowing that we poured the best of ourselves into it.

-=Vel=-

ravagon · May 12, 2003, 01:33

Utterly fantastic graphics Vel.

...

... is what I'm sure I would've been saying if they didn't all look like red "x"s.

Is it me and my browser or has something gone a little wrong somewhere?

Oh well - Congratulations on your utterly fantastic graphics anyway - whether they're for Candle'bre (for which I'll have to take your word) or from your upcoming noughts and crosses remake.

Velociryx · May 12, 2003, 09:28

Hiya Rav! Hmmm....not sure....I will go checking on that tho, to see if something is amiss!

-=Vel=-

EDIT: Well....Now I'm not sure! I just checked the threads, and the images appeared to me....what browser/version are you using?

ravagon · May 12, 2003, 22:53

Haven't changed browser (IE 5.something) settings for quite some time so it shouldn't be that. The unit threads in the Sleague forum seem to do the same thing for the early posts but recent images seem to show up fine.

Now this is very weird.
Going into a thread (before I've logged in) I see a dl link thingummy. After I log in all I see is the red x.
I'll have to try logging out, downloading and then logging back in again.

[Edit: Didn't work. To dl I had to log back in again, at which point it tells me I'm not logged in and hence can't dl. Mind you, having "logged in" I didn't have to do so again to post this so I was, er, am actually logged in whether it said/says so or not.

Ok, forget all that. I just reread it and it didn't make any sense to me either.

Too bad, how sad, nevermind.

]

Cyclotron · May 12, 2003, 23:47

Hmmm... now, if I wanted to I could just check our forums for all this, but I'm getting all red X's too.

What kind of files are these?

BustaMike · May 13, 2003, 03:35

They show for me. It's gotta be Apolyton. All the stuff Vel posted is just attachments.

Spaced Cowboy · May 13, 2003, 09:18

I can see them too. And they look mighty fine!

Cyclotron · May 13, 2003, 13:38

Screw it. Back to the Candleworks for me.

andkal · May 15, 2003, 07:40

I have to say I'm very impressed. I have been very curious about this project since you started working on it, and now that the first screenies are released I'm not disappointed at all.

Keep up the good work!

Velociryx · May 15, 2003, 10:24

Thank you for the vote of support! Our absolute insistence on cranking out a QUALITY game might mean that it takes us a bit longer (no....it definitely means that!), but IMO, it's the only way to do it! I'm glad you liked what you've seen so far....that tells me we're headed down the right path....

-=Vel=-

ravagon · May 16, 2003, 05:14

I was blind but now I see!

(Don't quite know whats going on there but everything looks ok now?)

Graphics look absolutely gobsmackingly fantabulous Vel!

Only thing I can add is give us more...

Velociryx · May 16, 2003, 10:00

Glad you can see the, Brother Rav! And not to worry.....I'm working on a little something that just might be the ticket.....

-=Vel=-
(who heads off to the top secret lab)