Ash of Gods Update #16

The latest post-funding update for Ash of Gods, the recently Kickstarted Banner Saga-like RPG, deals with some campaign-related logistics and talks about the backer portraits and AurumDust’s pledge-management system of choice. Apart from that, the update links to the latest installment of the developer diary, where we get to read all about what the studio’s been up to over the past few months. Animations, editing passes, Ash of Gods on Android, the game’s UI and music – it’s all there if you’re interested. Here’s a sampling:

Wanna play?

I love walking. A part of the route from my house to the office passes along the Moskva River embankment at Maryino Park. Now I’ve got something to fill that time other than enjoying the silence and the scent of the water. Like any normal human zombie I can now stare at my phone while I’m walking.

That’s because we finally managed to compile our battle “sandbox” to run on Android this week. It contains 36 finished characters (we still need to animate and integrаte seven more) and is indispensable for testing the AI and balancing the skills. It also provides me with the opportunity to watch how the AI plays itself and how deterministic its behavior is. A good AI should be able to lose in an interesting way, and that’s the main thing we’re trying to teach it at this stage.

[…] It’s tough to admit, but since the end of May we’ve practically had to rewrite the code for the combat system and the toolkit for creating combat characters. The first implementation required too much individual scripting by hand of the different skills.

In its new incarnation it consists of a couple of simple YAML files, and now you can describe all the animation, commands, skills, special effects and audio files of the characters with a basic text editor. A small script file does all the remaining dirty work for you. I don’t know how true Unity disciples manage to pull it off, but to my modest taste creating 2D animation “the Unity way” is a bag of hurt and a cup of unadulterated, over-the-top agony. It’s as if you’ve fallen straight into the Sixth Circle of Hell, and a simple piece of work that should take around 5-10 minutes turns into hours of clicking on the editor’s “convenient” tools and inspectors.