This month was crunch time for getting our demo ready on time for publishers, but as the norm, life has a way of being a massive pain at the worst times. From the end of Jan lasting through the majority of Feb, Emily was quite sick and misdiagnosis made it a pain to get back to normal. With the Producer being largely out of the loop, Harry and Tom took up the flack and focused on the publisher brochure. This had a knock-on effect with their work, but mostly for Tom as he was absorbing the role of our animator, trailer maker and Demo set dresser.
Tom was rumoured to gain at least 20 grey hairs during this time, but that might have been a vicious rumour. Who knows. We do know that it caused Harry to drastically go Blond, which Emily believes this was to get into the headspace of a sassy Producer. Again who knows...
February was really a push month for us - this was our target month to submit our Demo to various Publishers, but we knew now that this was quite a push.
We still had the trailer to finish, Charis was still working on the hands of Edric (ones before looked a little too zombie-esque), which meant Tom was held back a little on the animations for the hands and gameplay aspects of the trailer. Hence Tom's greys. Tom figured out a way to still animate the hands whilst Charis was working on the hands, we won't go into loads of details but it was essentially getting the skeleton right so he could start to rig. Happy days.
Although Tom did a great job animating, we realised now that the list of animations we wanted in the Demo could not be achieved in time for the Publisher submission. It simply takes too long, and Tom has entirely self-taught how to animate in 3D. This is fine, if he doesn't have a list of other design jobs to too. We realised that we must leave it for now, make it clear that we intend to hire an animator as soon as we have the funds for this. Our game still looks and plays great without all the animations we want, but it's just that polish level we want. Animations bring things to life - the world, the characters - stops things from looking passive.
During this month we managed to get the brochure completed, as well as trailer and animations. Charis also fitted in some new UI which was great to see.
We did run out of time to send the game off to Publishers though - mainly because we wanted some rounds of testing (internal and external) to be done before the publisher send outs happen.
So we moved the goal posts of the start of March... I guess watch this space (and for God sake cross your fingers and touch wood for us).
