John Baez from The Behemoth stopped by my Video Game Developers Club at UCI for a speaker event! We had a great time with him, and in return for setting up the event I was awarded a red knight from Castle Crashers! How awesome is that!?

Conjurer is picking up pace, despite interference from a secret side project that was only supposed to take a short time. >_< Expect a demo reel soon of the new level 3. The redesign has been very good to it!

Level 2’s redesign is almost complete. Thought you might like to have a look at it. Check it out full-screened in high quality!

The new level code allows me to create MUCH longer levels. They’re friggin’ huge now! You can see for yourself in the following image.

The top level is the new level 3 stage 1, the bottom is the old. As you can see, the new design is 4 times longer, with no serious hit to the CPU. I’m really excited to see how the new level redesigns go. Level 2 still needs some soft shadowing, as well as animated props and checkpoint events, but it’s coming along.

So you can see why it’s been a while since y’all saw an update. There are other reasons, some of which I’m not too fond of. On the lighter side, Southern California has been suffering through a bit of a heat wave lately, and my non-air-conditioned office must have cardboard for insulation because it gets downright miserable from 2 PM – 10 PM. I also helped a friend with another game project which I hope you’ll get to see soon. But, on a more serious note, I’m turning 30 in a couple of weeks, and for some reason I’m not taking it very well. It’s been hard to keep focus and stay motivated, but I do what I can. I should be back on track now. Progress like this is always inspirational.

P.S. I HATE Flash CS4. If I didn’t need native support for Flash 10, I would have never upgraded. The bones tool is a useless joke, my sessions crash repeatedly, despite the fact that I fixed a common corrupted font problem. Some filter effects turn off completely when you zoom in to certain levels. The deco tool is another useless toy. And the UI has so many glitches and bugs it’s nothing short of aggravating. And to top it all off, there is STILL a laundry list of bugs carried over from previous versions of Flash that they STILL HAVEN’T FIXED! Worst… upgrade… EVAR!

Just working on the color scheme for the first part of the new Level 2 redesign. What do you think? Now on to shading and highlights.

***[edit]***

Shadows and highlights are done.

Here are the rough layouts for the new level 2 design. My buddy Ryan and I have altered its original layout it to give it more of a purpose, starting from the outside road, showing off the remnants of a good city sacking, into the city, and finally finishing off in an arena.

Now on to deeper, darker, spiderier ice caves in level 3. Yay, I made up a word.

Looks like I have some work to do if I’m going to get Conjurer done in time.