Over the past few weeks, the team has launched the website, attended the Richmond Comic Con and released the 'Origins' video. We wanted to take a few minutes away from coding to share with you everything that went into getting these out the door.
From the beginning of the project, we knew that we needed a website. We knew that we wanted something that was both relatively original (realistically, you can only be so original without being distracting) and that really captured the core elements of Oblitia, no pun intended :). What we didn't know, was that we would be working on it up until the morning of the the launch date, the Richmond Comic Con.
The biggest challenge that we had with building the site wasn't the design or the development, the team has a solid background in these areas. What we struggled with, more than anything else, was ensuring we had content to share that was new to the Oblitia community and that would be helpful in understanding the game itself. Until this point, we had primarily released concept art but now we wanted to show how core features of the game would work. While we knew internally how we wanted these features to work, the game is still fairly early in development and we had limited gameplay to take screen captures from. Several of the mockups that showcase the features are ones that we put together for our first convention, VGU Con, back in August. Since then, as can be expected, there have been several changes that we wanted to include for the site launch. Foremost of these, was showcasing the way in which the terrain of the battlefield would be modified by abilities.
As can be seen in the image above, we have four different creatures, each preparing an elemental attack. In the top left, we have an ice elemental move which freezes the water tiles and blankets the land in snow. In the bottom left, we see an earth elemental attack that raises a mountain range across the land. In the top right we see a water elemental attack which floods low lying terrain. Finally, in the bottom right we see a fire elemental attack that is drying up the ocean and turning it into new land. Since this is the most important mechanic to showcase, we wanted to ensure it would be representative of the final product. While these are all early screen captures, the team will do whatever we can to ensure that we are able to reproduce this level of functionality in the released version.
With the site wrapped up, we needed to finish the launch video. We had found the narrator, the talented Daniel Ross, through our composer and after discussing the project with him, signed him on board. The script for the video was actually written within the first month of the project but needed to be trimmed down as we estimated it would likely run 8-10 minutes if left uncut. Perhaps one day we will release an extended 'director's cut' of the trailer :). The music had been left in the capable hands of Tuomas and now that we were approaching the launch date, we sat down with him to review where things were at and leverage his help in mixing the vocal narration into the music mix. If there's interest, maybe we can convince Tuomas/Daniel to write a small segment explaining how their process for recording/mixing/mastering of the audio for the game. Please be sure to comment if this is something you'd like to see.
Two days before Comic Con we now had mixed music/narration and had just received updated background images from one of our artists, Marko Markovic. No one on the dev team had much experience with video editing so it took us a little longer than expected to master Adobe Premeire to the requisite level to handle the motion of the images. Once we figured out the basics though, we had the finished cut ready Friday afternoon.
Friday, we received our t-shirt order, the printed promo cards and with site/video ready, we drove down to Richmond for the Comic Con. That night, we uploaded the video (literally finished around 04:30 in the morning!) and slept for a couple hours. It was a busy few weeks but we accomplished a great deal and were quite proud of the results.
In the next segment, which we promise will not take as long as this one, we will provide insight into the convention itself and discuss a few mechanics of Oblitia gameplay.
-B
