07/05/18

Welcome back to another SCO progress update! I mentioned in the mid-May update that we were targeting a July release, and that was theoretically possible at the time, but unfortunately my bills caught up with me so July is not going to be when we release SCO. My original plan with SCO was to release in June, and the financial plans I made surrounding that would've worked, but the original plan to release in June didn't account for many of the huge changes we figured out during the course of development like the three-phase battle system or the attack speed system for combat giving attacks their own travel time and calculating the real-time(once both have started - Fights are still turn-based) travel speed and position of the attack and the target to determine if it would really hit. These are all things we feel are critically important for making SCO a rich game with thoroughly satisfying and engaging gameplay - But they take time to make, test, and improve on, not to mention hashing out the details of how it works in the first place. (Curious about what I mean? Think about how you would actually decide the details of how a system like that works: Hitbox-based? Grid tile-based? Partial evasion if the player gets "grazed" or an all-or-nothing setup? Do stats play into this? Which stats? How much? What about abilities, what effect do they have? How does this change as people progress through the levels and get higher ranking abilities?) Yeah I get it, but when is SCO coming??? Right, back to the whole time, release, bills, etc - Since essentially my savings ran out at the end of June, I had to get a side job to pay my rent and stuff. I started working graveyard shift at a 7-11 convenience store two weeks ago - My plan is to work there 3-4 days a week to get enough money to pay my bills, then work on SCO on my days off and a little bit on work days as much as I can (Going from working sitting down all day to working standing up all day is taking some adjustment). This cuts my available time to work on development to probably about 35-40% what it was before, so the release date naturally is pushed back with that. I honestly don't really want to give another date and push it back again, but I'll say that I'd like to get things mostly ready to go in about 3 months. And I will keep you all posted with regular progress updates at least every month, more frequently if I have exciting news to share. Speaking of, I think it's time to show you all some proper screenshots of the game. Before I show these, let me provide some context: 1) These should be considered images of a rough game prototype, not how the final game will look. My plan is to commission art and styles for, well, quite a lot of things in the game. So take what you see and imagine if an artist drew proper art for it, and you'll be closer to what the final game will look like. 2) Everything shown here is subject to change. This is the nature of game development. It takes a lot of work to initially get a playable version of the game ready, and then it becomes a lot of rapid changes, trying out things, tweaking them, trying out the tweaked version and comparing - Many, many times refining it, almost like how a sculptor makes hundreds or thousands of strikes with their hammer and chisel before the final statue is done, and it can look pretty unrecognizable until close to the very end. So if you look at something and think "wow that looks rough and awkward" - We probably look at it and think the same thing, and will be working on that before release. Without further ado, here's how some of our prototypes look: Battle https://i.imgur.com/FmG4psF.png Abilities Page (you rock Chi) https://i.imgur.com/fUYpwDL.png Character Creation https://i.imgur.com/yCMASpO.png Feel free to come chat about this with us on Discord: https://discord.gg/N9xFmDr And thank you all for your continuing interest and support! -Lsmjudoka