Since grad school restarted in January, it has been difficult to find solid blocks of time to devote to the game. I have since graduated from NYU and completed the business incubator that I participated in over the Summer. I now have more time to give to AtW, so I should be able to update more frequently.
My focus continues to be on art and level design. I am more of a programmer / game designer than an artist, much more comfortable with solving technical problems over aesthetic ones. Over my time in school, I’ve developed more of a hyper-minimalist art style, making games that did not require a ton of artistic skill. With more complicated 3D art, it takes me a good deal of time to create the smaller assets. I may compromise by making everything everything even more visually abstract and emphasize on gameplay and scripted events.
Level design requires frequent play tests, which I will conduct publicly every Thursday at 5 at the NYU Game Center in Brooklyn. This is a content-driven game. Procedural code is limited to brick layout, rather than the creation of structures in the world. At one point I had full randomly generated biomes in the game, but it ruined the feeling of being exposed on the side of a bare flat wall, in addition to introducing performance issues. There are currently six different biomes in the game that I have manually placed around the level areas. If I do reintroduce procedural biomes, they would be sparse, infrequent, and away from the central story area.
Outside of AtW, I am working on my networked multiplayer space shooter called Asterisk. I have also produced a number of smaller games, such as Alternate Function IV and Nothing Good Can Come Of This.
More info as I progress.
