Satan Sam.co.uk

I’ve got myself a little job doing some graphics so Tormi has taken a bit of a backseat of late. But it’s all peaches and cream, 3 days ago I set about doing a whole overhaul of the graphics. I’ve updated all the sprites ingame and soon all the backgrounds will be updated too. Apparently looking more Nintendo-ish. Which aint too bad! I’ve finally applied a consistent graphics style!

Other than that I’ve just been putting in work for the manual, I’m aiming to keep it as small as possible and rely more on visual and audio hints in the game itself.

I’ve almost been working on this for a year. 11 months since it began as my Design Experience project, heh, the filename is still that too!

^ old sprite, just for kicks.

A friend of mine (mr. Del Duio) has just released his Castlevania-ish platform adventure game; Hasslevania! It’s got a bit of a mad story and some even madder voice overs. It’s a fun little (big) game that you should all check out!

http://satansam.co.uk/ftp/Hasslevania.zip (126mb)

I’m taking a week off from Tormishire to work on some graphics for another chaps game.

Also going to plan an update to the graphics. I don’t like them. Everyone tells me otherwise but it’s not enough. I gave myself a new style with Sam and I feel I should start another with Tormi at least. It’s more the distant backgrounds I’m not happy with. I’m really not happy just having rocks in the back, even though it is a cave. I can use the excuse it’s a magic cave!

I don’t normally do this – but go buy Mario Galaxy. If you don’t have a Wii then get off the internet, pimp yourself, and buy one. This is possibly the best commercial game I’ve ever played.

That is all.

And little edit- Sorry if you guys have had trouble posting comments here. Turns out my anti-spam thingy went haywire. Found lots of non-spammy comments in there. Should be sorted now! Sorry if I accidentally deleted anyones comments too!

Sorry it’s been so quiet everyone! I haven’t been working much on the game other than concept work for the upcoming areas. Suppose I might as well let some cats out of some bags-

-Remember the old funky water placement in Sam, where you’d get a blob of water suspended in midair? They’re back! I’ve also updated the water part of the engine to support variable strengths of torrents which hold the player back. There’s also one new swimming method which makes navigating through torrents easy. But that’s not for today!

-I’ve visually updated the first boss and tweaked him a little bit. Just added a network of pipes and (out of shot) some cogs that control his little Van de Graaff generator.

-This might be the time to talk about Medals. In the game there are 32 medals waiting to be collected. Whenever you fulfil a certain task (that’s outside of the normal game, barring boss fights), be it serious or silly, you get a shiny little medal. These are viewable from the game menu and have a progress bar to show how many you’ve collected. They’re just for fun really and add to the replayability, plus there’s a bit of mystery around them as some characters will give you cryptic hints at some of the less obvious ones.

In a short while I would have finished chapter 2 for Tormishire. The first one was done a while ago if you folks remember and it was about introduction and setting the scene and tone and that. The 2nd one is about direct challenge against the player; it’s basically a giant level styled on the concept of one of my first games; Trip to the Top. The 3rd is likely to be about exploration since you’ll have enough items and skills at this stage to break away from the bottlenecked introduction. Think Twilight Princess when you first reach the Hyrule Field!

-Spell! Think I might have uploaded this before!

Concept art for a boss in Tormi. It’s a bit of a strange one to play, the pic will make more sense when you actually fight the big chap.

Was listening to Enya – Boadicea whilst making this one which I think really helped the haunting look of it all. Took about 30 minutes in Painter X.