All Hallow’s Eve has gone and November has started. In this venue, the blog would like to at the same time point out that it’s not completely dead, even if the production has been silent. Real life has an interesting way of keeping us busy when we least expect it.

Hopefully your November starts in good spirits, and as always, thank you for reading!

It’s that time of the year again, to get together with family and friends; To partake in lavish feasts teetering on tables laden to the brim.

Foxes are close enough substitute for reindeers, right?

Onwards to the next year our trusty steed! There’s a lingering feeling the sled will go off the cliff by the time the festivities are over.

Enjoy the holidays in good spirits, and stay dapper!

Hello again!

The project is still alive, and picking up pace, fingers crossed on that!

Time has passed again, and another year on the blog has gone. The past half a year has moved at a languid pace, but we finally have an intro screen that will double as a road map on the things you’ve accomplished during the game. The room will slowly fill with trophies you’ve claimed along the way, and characters you meet might be found resting there from time to time when you start the game.

The intro screen has been graciously designed by the fantastically talented Zedotagger.

While I keep saying this again and again, hopefully there’ll be basic gameplay to show next time.

Until then, thank you once again for reading!

Hoo-ah!

It’s been another handful of months and there’s been some progress! Not as much as I’d like, but real life comes betwixt things to drive amiss the iron hammer of progress. We’ve missed our initial deadline for making workable tilesets, a costly mistake on our timetable, but we’re trying to work for a solution with the artists.

The main party’s character art has been completed for now, with possible few polishes, but you can consider the artwork below to be the final product, even if in a down-scaled size. The final artwork has been done by the talented Kiguri!

On the animation side of things, Zedotagger has been managing a workload I wouldn’t have personally thought possible, considering all the hoops they’ve had to pounce through with me on the leash giving opinions and changes!

The animation below is complete, but in the game itself, the individual frame-set will have different pauses, and frame speeds during animation. Thank you for your understanding.

All in all, I’d like to wish for a good belated Lunar Year of the Fire Rooster, hopefully we’re off towards a productive stretch this time around. Thank you for reading this far, hopefully the wait has been worth it.

It’s been a busy two months, and the project nears another year in progress!

We are now (operative word: slowly) putting together the basic form of the game, in order to make a deadline mid-November to have a small scale playable demo out (fingers crossed!). The idea is to demonstrate basic functionality and gameplay. While I can’t promise much in the way of playable content, it should go to give some sort of credibility as to the project’s progress.

While I don’t have much in the way of live feed that I could paste here, here’s another working piece for monster combat animations:

Dire Centipede Naritarashi

That’s all for now, hopefully we’ll have a bit of gameplay for show next time!

And as always, thank you for reading this far!

Hello again!

I hope spring has turned its green leaf towards summer in bright atmosphere for everyone. It’s been a long while since the last post, mostly due to my busy schedule with work, and otherwise due to not having much concrete new content to spoil you guys with. Regardless, the development process continues, and we’re slowly animating the monsters in order to start putting together a rudimentary setup to get the first chapter of the game running. Hopefully we’ll have the first chapter of the game as a technical demo available towards the end of the year!

In other news, I’ve been silently developing a pen-and-paper tabletop version of the project, and am now slowly moving to playtesting. This allows me to further process the lore for the game before adding the juiciest parts in to the main project. Frankly, I’m doing this side project more as a way to pass time than anything else, but in doing so, I’m also hoping it’ll be a worthwhile addition, especially considering the amount of work going into this project.

Summa summarum, the possible rumors about the death of this project have been exaggerated.

Hoping to have something better for you guys next time!

Hello again!

The year has turned over a new leaf, and I hope everyone has managed to digest their seasonal treats as things slowly settle back into a normal schedule.

All has not been quiet on Alrothia front either, the team has been bolstered with the help of Zedotagger, a magnificent person capable of the lost, (and possibly) mysterious art of pixel-bending. Zed has been helping with monster artwork for the project. Their works and different tidbits on life can be found under: https://twitter.com/Zedotagger.

It’s funny how the workflow has finally reached a point where I’ve managed to move simple drafts through the concept artist, who has managed to steal my ideas through power sockets for long enough to sketch actual concept art that is more easily understood by our other artists. A good example is the Oni below, created by the talented Kiguri, http://kiguri.tumblr.com/. Thank you for your patience, I know I’m not always the easiest to deal with…

As the work flows onwards, I can pass the concept artwork forward to our pixel artists, who then manage to create something absolutely beautiful. As someone said prior, the project no longer looks like someone was scribbling notes on a roll of toilet paper, and I’ll have to agree with them. The project has always been about trying to revive a comfy SNES/PSX -era pixel artwork style, while trying to apply modern techniques to improve upon the result. As pictures have often been said to convey more than a thousand words, I’ll let you decide for yourself whether the project is moving in the right direction.

Oni idle animation (colors not final).

And with that, I feel we’re done for now. I wish you a good start on 2016, and I hope you’ll be interested in following this dreadfully slow blog on its way to project completion.

Thank you for your continued support!

Hopefully everyone has had an awfully spooky, sloppy, and otherwise resplendent All Hallows’ Eve!

I just had to let the thought sink in: Two years in the making already… It’s been a wild ride so far, and steady progress has been made, artists have come and gone, some have worked meticulously fast, while others have butted heads with me. You know who you are, and I love you all regardless!

First off, I’ll have to apologize for being a huge turn-coat. The engine ended up changing to Unity 5, as I finally managed to hire a (more proficient than I am) coder for a stable project position. This also means, that we are able to move our scope towards what I’d like to call a bit more modern standards, and we can crank our resolution a scale up to boot.

There’s very little apart from art assets being amassed at this point going on. Except that our first engine prototype has been completed, and it’s running the game fairly well. Now it’s about time to start putting flesh on the bony framework. The real work has just begun!

I’ll send you off to our third year with a piece that says goodbyes to the last warmth of the Summer, guiding us through the mellow Autumn, and welcomes you to the fluffy Winter that awaits us. Once again, thank you, for being a part of the project in your own way through reading these inane ramblings of mine.

Hello again! This time, I’ve continued on the tangent of things from last time, and decided to elaborate on how the world and its denizens manifest.

Yomi (陰府) – The Underworld

This is the land known by many names, such as Yomi (陰府 The Underworld), Yo no Kuni (夜の国 Land of Night), and Mu (無 Void). A shadowy land rumoured to exist at the center of the earth, and a place from where different malign creatures come from to haunt the mortal realm. It is believed that the souls of the dead that did not reach enlightenment to break out of the karmic circle fall here through the murky shadowy depths to meet with Yôh (陰王 Lord of the Underworld) in order to be judged. The soul is then decreed a time to serve in Yomi for a time period depending on their sins in the mortal world, and then  further returned to the karmic cycle to be reborn as a mortal again in search of true virtue and enlightenment.

Yomi itself is a barren, rocky realm, twisted in bleached white colours of seemingly long dead veins of thorns offset by hues of rocks covered in black not unlike soot. Snow-like flakes of ash perpetually falling and slowly being blown around the barren world. At the center of the Underworld lies the Palace of Yôh, where an eternal revel is being held.

Kai (界) – The Physical World

This is the realm where mortals tread the lands hand in hand with beasts, spirits, and kami. This is the plane that is like a barrier separating the divines from the underworld; A place where influences of both realms appear in order to affect the threads of fate woven for mortals.

The subject matter at hand is too large to go into much detail, as this is the actual game world where most things happen.

Nairin (内輪) – The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle is where most of the lesser kami, and deified beasts reside. These kami are the ones that most often descend upon the physical world in order to reside in the forests, rocks, and temples, and are among the others, most visible to the mortal population. Thus these kami are also the most solid contact with the spirit realm to the common folk, and small shrines are often dedicated to local lesser deities to aid the prevention of disasters, as well as to aid the harvest for the year. In return, the kami ask spiritually attuned mortals favours. Among the kami, the lesser deities are not strong enough to ascend to to the Outer Circle, but are instead often used as direct messengers for the greater kami. Sometimes the kami to emerge from mortals are folk heroes of great deeds, and beasts that have outlived their natural lifespans.

Gerin (外輪) – The Outer Circle

The Outer Circle can be understood as the high heavens. Most powerful kami reside there, among divine beasts. The entities from the Outer Circle have to be separately summoned to descend to the mortal realm, and are thus an immensely rare sight with very few exceptions in between, and the price to summon them costly. Mortals ascending to the Outer Circle are usually born of great villains, folk heroes, and saints who have attained enlightenment.

With this, I’ll leave you with a bonus picture of an Outer Circle Beast for putting up with the long ramble about the world layout.

Hello again! Spring has slowly steered towards summer in the past two months and it’s getting warm enough to actually go for an outing. This time I thought I’d open a bit more on the role of magic in the world.

There are two types of magic, I’ll start with the less interesting one. The ‘path of the enlightened’, or ‘Myôdô’ (明道), which is a type of magic used by the exorcists, sorcerers, and diviners of the ‘kannari no michi‘, called ‘Myôdôsha’ (明道者). Instead of using the raw magical power residing in the world directly, they consult the kami in the land to help them, or alternatively use magical talismans and seals to affect the world, and spirits around them. In doing so, they lessen the strain on their own bodies. The myôdôsha can thus consult local lesser kami, and land deities to help them in their quest, as well as seal malign spirits. You could think of them as a combination of modern-day detectives, wandering priests, and exorcists.

In contrast to the myôdôsha, the land has its own darker flavor of magic users: ‘Gedô Majya / Majya’ (外道魔者 / 魔者), heretic mages who have strayed from the path of the enlightened. Formerly powerful court mages who were expunged from the society due to corruption, and an attempt at a coup in order to combine the seat of power with the mage nobility, cementing the matrimony of religion and ruling power, which lead to a hundred-year long hunt for heretics called ‘Majyagari’ (魔者狩) 368 years prior to the present. Their ranks among the nobility abolished, the majya retreated into their cloistered fortresses, and ruins in the abandoned parts of the realm. Some say they are still around, living in the shadows of the modern society, plotting their rise back to power.

The majya use their power to bind the raw elemental powers to do their bidding without the help of spirits. In fact, the more powerful mages are capable of even chaining lesser kami, and spirits of the underworld as their familiars. Sadly, the vessel that is the human body is not meant to be used to conduct these raw powers, and excessive use of the magic starts eroding the essence of self. Thus majya who originally had a noble goal in mind might lose their sight of what the means to the goal were, and in the end, the means become the goal.

As for the spirits and kami, due to their magical origin, they aren’t affected as such by the magic themselves, but are mostly limited to the element they are affiliated with. Meanwhile artifacts imbued with magic, are known to create personalities unto themselves over time. These artifacts range from lesser items such as smoking pipes which summon a lesser kami, to artifacts that have outlived their original creators by far, and are unpredictable and dangerous. The more powerful an artifact is, the more likely it has been sealed away in a temple under lock and key, and as such are coveted by many majya, withal other evildoers.

That’s all for now, thank you for reading this far!

With regards to the topic at hand, have a lesser disease spirit, keukegen.