Previews & Possibilities

Greetings all! I'm making a quick, spur of the moment post just to let all three of my readers know I'm still kicking. Here are some general updates on the new "Age of Fire" successor:

- The single most time consuming part of this projects development, believe it or not, has been naming. I've been fooling around with a process that's very different from what I usually do to get less "samey" feeling results. It takes much, much longer, though, and I have two full notebooks to prove it.

 

- I've done a few "play tests" with hex grid maps, testing out general concepts like terrain types and win conditions for matches. This probably took a lot longer than you think! I went through a few different map sizes and layouts, team sizes, mechanics, etc.

 

- Slowly but surely I am also building a gallery of wildlife photography to use as inspiration for skins.

- I have not made up my mind yet on how many skins there will be per character, but as stated previously, it will definitely be fewer than what was standard in Ages (so <12).

 - A lot of time has also been spent deciding what flora & fauna work best for set dressing. Obviously things like Tyrannosaurus rex are always going to be in high demand as either playable characters or bosses, but picking the background fodder is often more difficult. Ideally you want creatures that are exotic enough to fit the ancient setting but aren't so interesting that people will want to play as them. On this front the ambient creature roster is basically complete (I do have one or two I might switch out, depending). I also have an extensive list of paleo-flora that I'm narrowing down to reasonable numbers. How exactly I'll go about drawing it is still up in the air, however: some ancient plants are so funky and alien it'd almost be a crime not to draw them, but there's also a lot of familiar looking stuff like spruce and fir trees that might be a bit boring and repetitive to render. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

- I took down the roster teaser I had previously posted because there have been multiple changes to it since then. Mostly just character names and classes shuffling around, but the size of the roster has also expanded again. It's currently looking like 48 characters. This is, quite frankly, a ridiculous number, but every time I think I'm done a nagging voice in the back of my head reminds me of something I love that couldn't make the cut solely because I told myself I wouldn't go over a certain number. At this point I've just accepted this won't be a terribly realistic concept, and that if I'm going to create a re-do / spiritual successor to Age of Fire, I might as well go all out.

 - Movesets and special abilities have been outlined for all of those characters, though admitting to varying degrees. I'd say most are 70-100% done, but a few of the new additions and more challenging concepts are majors works in progress.

- I've done grayscale sketches for one quarter of the roster. These drawings are small and very heavily referenced (a few of them are basically just Google images I drew over) so I don't feel great about parading them around everywhere. They're really just for planning purposes. Still, this is the most I've drawn in many months and it's got me wondering how much further I can push these drawings when I'm drawing them "for realsies". 

 - So far the project is still untitled.

 

Unrelated to that, I've also made an account on a new art platform called Purely Human. This is a brand new, still in development site that's being put together by a very small team. There's no guarantee it'll get big or even be around one year from now, but I want to give it a shot! It was created to be a less commercial alternative to DeviantART that prohibits the use of generative AI, and personally I'm pretty excited by that idea. Purely Human is very much still in the process of being built however and is a bit rough to use right now, so please temper your expectations! I've begun uploading some of my favorite pieces in hopes of helping out. If you're reading this and also create art I'd like to encourage you to do the same! You can also learn more by watching this video made by the creator.