A New Beginning

We have moved to our new home at www.littlewarlock.com and will not update this blog any longer. Instead you will find the latest news on our new homepage or on the forums at the new homepage.

GGC is over and we had a blast!

This year’s edition of GGC is the best one we’ve attended. Instead of just showing the games to the public and trying to make sure all jurors got time to play as well; this year the show was divided between talks and playtime, the balance between them both turned out great.

The talks were great. The speakers were inspiring, interesting and gave us a lot of yummy mindfeed and ideas. Especially Daniel James and Jason VandenBerghe made great impressions and we are so grateful to the school for arranging so that we students got to hear them!

On the show floor there were so many amazing projects displayed! Projects with out of the box thinking, cool mechanics, polished art, elegant code and fun gameplay and it’s so cool to be part of this community! 

We want to thank the jury, our teachers and friends for inspiration, feedback and pushing us forwards.

In the end we were awarded the Best 2^nd Year Project, The Cha-Ching Award and The Pwnage Award. We are super happy, humbled and most of all it’s such a wonderful feeling to get confirmation that our idea is a good one, that people get it, that there is a reason to keep working on our game. And we will keep working on our game! 

BUT!

Now we will take a couple of days off, play some Diablo 3 and watch some Dreamworks and Pixar-movies. Next week we will start planning the road to getting Little Warlock on the market, hopefully in the end it will be paved in gold. :)

Stay tuned!

Our office (which is really just a corner of our living room) with the awards to keep us inspired as we continue our work.

GGC

We are live at GGC and the crowd loves us!

It's great fun to see that the game works, that people are getting it and to hear all the wonderful feedback and useful advices we are getting! 

We have a trailer!

This is the first trailer we have done, its very early in development stage but we still think it looks quite good :)

Enjoy!

GGC is drawing near...

...and we are confident that we will show a good game! 

This week we have spent most of our time play testing, bug fixing and polishing things. 

Lina has divided her time between presentation practice and improving the design so the player gets a good experience, but also continued her never ending work of iterating the art. 

Jerry has been busy patching up all bugs we could find. He also went over the card cost algorithms again to make sure every card has a cost relative to it’s strength.  

We also went through all the fonts in game (AGAIN) and made some changes and hopefully they will work as intended from now on. 

Finally the actual webpage displaying the game got some well-deserved love as well!

Successes and victories!

At one point in the project we were afraid (and planned for) that we would have to cut content to be sure we had enough time to get a finished demo, we then sat down and discussed the problem and what’s important for us to show in the game.

We came to the conclusion that we had to work even harder since neither of us felt comfortable cutting stuff from the initial plan of end product. This decision paid off and we can now proudly say that we managed to get every card we set out to do in the game AND also added a playable tutorial instead of just a static picture with instruction text. So instead of cutting, we are adding, and the results are looking great!

The biggest thing that happened this week was the creation and implementation of two new cards for the Autumn-deck. Lina has created art for the cards and the in game sprites and Jerry has been busy animating. We have also implemented sound and music in the game (and what sweet music that is!), started rehearsing the jury presentation and done the usual play testing, iterating and polishing.

So say hello to Morgas and his minions and enjoy some of the first iterations of  music and sound in the game:

Alpha Gameplay

We are right on track with our schedule and this week it was time for our big outside game test which was a great success! We got confirmation once again that our combat is fun and easy to learn and we got a lot of useful feedback on what we need to work more on.

The things that need more work is especially to make the visual feedback to the player even clearer so that there is no misunderstanding in what to do in combat. Another important lesson from the test is that we need to make a playable tutorial so that we make sure that people new to the genre understands how to play our game. This will add to the workload but we should be able to pull through.

Here is a video of the combat in its current state, there are still some dummie graphics and a bunch of tweaks to be made, Enjoy.

Another week in the books...

The big news this week is that we got the loot system implemented and working (WOO!) and also we redesigned the deck editor to give a more visual feedback and feel more intuitive to the beginner. We think this was a great success and it feels so much more in line with the rest of the game now, and we hope that next week’s testing will prove us right.

Jerry has besides that been implementing the mechanics to remove unwanted creatures or structures on the game board and to discard cards. He also made the functionality to be able to produce, store and use runes and finally he made a nice video for you lot to watch.

Lina has been working hard on iterating many of our assets to make sure they fit nice together. She also has been busy working on ideas for the presentation and planning the work to come.

Sticks and stones may break his bones.

This week Jerry gave the gridsystem and castingsystem a well needed iteration. He also managed to add the missing functionality to target buildings and warlocks. He also added full ranged functionality for creatures and implemented the animations and graphics for our real first creature.

Lina has been iterating a lot of art, created animations for various buildings and also made some new card art. She then scetched up the walk animation cycle while learning Toon Boom and worked together with Jerry to create all the animations.

And without further adue we present a very strict looking skeleton.

GUI week

This week Lina have been working on the overall GUI design and the graphics for the deck editor. She has also spent some quality time on deciding what fonts will be used in the game and made the elements for the deck editor.

Jerry has implemented the mechanics for resource gain and also created a level editor where we can set rules for each combat location so that we can create different levels in a heartbeat. He even had time to work a bit on the deck editor, the enemy AI and to implement some of the art.

Finally we have had some external testing with very good feedback!

Here is a video of the current state of the game:

Building the world

This week Lina has made backgrounds and icons for some of the scenes in the world. We now have our adorable little kingdom where the player can visit the tower to have a look at his cards and the battle map and even though much of it is still subject to changes we like the direction it's taking.

Jerry has finished up the deck editor and also created functionality for the inventory to be able to build and save decks and add or remove cards. He even had time to implement some of the new graphics that allows the player to navigate the kingdom and tower.

We also recieved some wonderful tunes from Andreas at Audio Norr and we can't wait until they are implemented!

Next week we will dive into the wonderous world of creating a functional GUI.

The current state of the Deck Editor with it's wonderful placeholder graphics ;-)

Helloworld

Welcome to the blog of Little Warlock, a browser based collectable card game that is currently being developed. Our goal is to show a demo of some of the game features at Gotland Game Conference 2012.

In the following weeks there will be frequent updates that tracks our progress so feel free to stick around for more info on our game!