Tuesday 25 March 2008

Good news and bad news...

I'll begin with the bad news - due to the massive volume of school exams coming very soon, progress updates here will be sparse(r) over the coming months. I'll post when I can, but there won't be much Slipslide progress to post about.

At present, Slipslide has two complete levels, one very-nearly-complete level and one that's about halfway done. A lot of the music is already in progress, with three pieces completed, and the story is 90% finished. I hope to gain more speed in the level-creation department soon as my digital painting skills improve, so it shouldn't take too long - but "Spring 2008" is unfortunately looking quite unlikely now.

However, the good news is that our blog has been rated
8.4/10 (or "Great") by blogged.com, a blog listing site (which I don't recall submitting myself to, but meh). I've even got a score badge to prove it!

ExeSoft at Blogged

Saturday 8 March 2008

Digi-paint!

Having written a few tunes, I decided that it was time to start on the rest of the levels. So, I now have a layout for level 3 (which is set in Slipsville, Dan's hometown) and have started the background (digitally painted in the GNU Image Manipulation Program). So far, I have a lone building in a vast field of grey:

As you can see I'm going for a fairly cartoony style with this. The building currently casts no shadow, but that'll be fixed as soon as there's something to cast a shadow onto.
In this level, there will be three main buildings at the front, a large square at the top-left and an airport at the back, with a runway on the right of it. The object of this level is to get Dan from his house to the airport, where he hopes to catch a flight to Antarctica. Naturally all doesn't go to plan, but that's a story for later on...

Sunday 2 March 2008

The silence is broken!

If you visit this blog frequently, you may have noticed a complete lack of anything at all over the last two weeks. Don't worry, the Slipslide 2 project is not dead. But time has been short, even more so than normal, and the exams have been coming thick and fast.

I have recently invested in Image Line's FL Studio 7 XXL for producing the game's music, which allows for much better instrument sounds and sound quality, as well as compression, stereo separation and parametric equalisation which all help make the music sound much better. The powerful synthesisers included also mean that I can use it to make the sound effects as well. With this extra power at my disposal, I have now started work on the remainder of the songs which will be required by the game - I hope to post some of these here in the near future.

The release date is, as always, still hazy. I'm estimating about a month or so, but you can never really tell with these sorts of projects. Whatever happens, I'm sure that I will still hit my "spring 2008" target which I set at the beginning of the project - "spring" gives me a good few months' leeway thankfully!