Raygun Gothic

‘This here’s the sample plot graphic I alluded to at The Aetheric Ludometer, trimmed down somewhat for the sake of spoilers and generally protecting our work. ;)

The task I set myself was to plot a period covering millennia, in which the actions of two species affect the three playable factions on the galactic stage during DarkConduit’s ‘present day’.

The plot as it stands begin at a time named ‘The Grand Stasis’, in which a technologically superior race named the Elders have rescued humanity and the Earth from self-destruction. The Elders hoped to set things back on the right course after civil war and widespread ecological damage took hold; mankind was not ready for the singularity which they accidentally brought about.

I don’t want to go too far into the plot at this time, but the experiment ultimately failed, and so the Elders intervened again. With the Earth now ruined, they Elders had little choice other than to find a new seed world. In the time it took to find a suitable candidate, opinion began to divide and the Elders decided to split the humans. One faction would be left entirely as they were, while the other would be granted enlightenment through religion. The former became known as Andrans; the latter, Koyaan.

That’s pretty much what caused the ‘present’ political situation in the galaxy. Three major factions (you may notice that I left one faction off - this was intentional!) vie for political and industrial position, all the while fighting enemies at home: splinter factions, like the Cy’jurann and Exiles. They fought through their own trials after events at The Divining, but were reunited at The Summoning. I wanted the plot graphs to be capable of showing all this with as little room for confusion as possible.’

(Source: raygun-gothic.net)

DarkConduit Design Document

I’m quite pleased with the way that this - my neater, offline copy of the design document - is coming along. Use of some simple heading and paragraph styles makes this neat and concise, in ways that MediaWiki simply cannot reproduce. It’s all in the contents page!

(Source: raygun-gothic.net)

DarkConduit Wiki for Blue Demon Studio

Yep, it’s another exciting glimpse of a wiki. I did just want to describe my workspace somewhere on this blog though, even if (as often happens) I have little actual work to submit.

I’ve been using Google Chrome pretty exclusively for a couple of months now, and find features like its ‘Create Application Shortcuts’ to be immensely useful. Here I can open a link to our wiki, directly from my desktop, into a window devoid of distractions such as may be found on my bookmarks toolbar or my Chrome extensions. It also makes for a larger working space, which is no bad thing.

Development is continuing fairly solidly, as we have a clear vision for the game and are building up to an alpha model soon. here are still changes being made, and doubtless there’ll be more to come after we’ve had a chance to test the engine. For now though, we’re all taking great pride in DarkConduit and what it looks set to achieve.

The Joys of Wiki

Work continues apace on our web game, and this manages to comprise the majority of my work space. I do enjoy writing wiki - it’s organised, tidy and easy to trace back when updated. It can also throw up some scary numbers, as while 3000-odd words isn’t much at all, I tend to ‘zone out’ while typing it and so end up surprised.

I’ve also taken a few dabbles into thumbnail designs, such as for the UI. I hope to smarten this up a bit and make a dedicated post about this, as it’s an important new aspect of my work:

DarkConduit:

It’s rare that I can gather something worthy of showing these days - documentation is often quite volatile and not especially pretty, but nevertheless it is occupying my project time these days. This is a web game I and a couple of former uni. colleagues are working on, with the hopes of releasing it for fun and profit. This contents page includes a template - my favourite means of providing page-to-page navigation - and links to separate bibles, for technical and artistic data.

Fire Fairy Ring:

The Dweller village’s self-proclaimed “Fire Fairy”, warming up in the village’s performance area.

Sinnyo’s House:

Protagonist Sinnyo’s dwelling: a hollowed-out tree, which is typical for his species and culture. He and his friend Élise have emerged from within to engage with their fellow Dwellers.