Tourney has Gone Into Alpha!

Alpha

This month I finished all of the elements for the last level, and that means the game has oficially got it's first alpha release! 

The work included finishing off all of the objectives, a story custscene at the end (which has a few different alterations depending on what happens) and some credits.

With that done the next stage will be to do a few run throughs so I can check for balance.

King

A character that appears in the end level is the the king. I had to make a new sculpture for him based on the artwork that the illustrator had done for him where he shows up in the story cutscenes! You can see this artwork, and the resulting model I made below:

UI & Settings

I have also done a complete overhaul of the games menus and user interface (sliders, option buttons, check boxes and so on). It was long overdue. Previous menus that I have shared here have been ones that I had half thought were done, but also half thought I may finish off at some point later. That would probably mean nothing would happen. I didn't think that any of it looked massively polished (except for the main toolbars in the game itself) so I spent some time and got some much more refined versions, like this one:

Levelling Up

Another element of the game that I had not implemented as well as I wanted was what I had originally called training. I could not get this to feel right - one of the main problems being that I could not work the knight spending actual time on training, since time use is one of the challenges. So I tried a few things - but none of them really worked. So instead I use a more traditional xp and level up approach... as you can see from the above!

So with the game in the first official testing phase the next few weeks will be spent doing that with a few friends at first, then moving on to a wider closed beta with the kickstarter backers some time in October!

And the final release... still planned for November