Midorea Development

[Angelic.Demon]

I love the gryphons, especially the little fella on the left side, he/she is adorable c:

[Catghost]

Glad to hear it!

We've been a bit quiet on the v3 progress lately, but that doesn't reflect our actual progress at all. I've been pretty busy with real life stuff - so whenever I found the time to work on V3, updating you guys slipped through the cracks of everything else that has to be done. I'm trying to get back on top of of v3 work and get a more solid schedule going for progress updates. Will keep you posted!

It also doesn't help that we've switched our focus from conceptual work to the actual mechanics development, so basically less visual stuff to share, which I never felt was very interesting. None the less we'll share what we can!

[Catghost]

Tribe concept art for Zuntai.

[Catghost]

We are actively seeking Concept Artists, Web Developers(PHP, HTML, jQuery, JavaScript/web languages), marketers, and possibly world builders for our project. If you know of someone who might be interested, let them know we're looking. You can contact us here.

[Catghost]

Iquian concept art!

[Katsuya]

Oh, that's very cool. I didn't even notice the jaguar at first. Love that.

[Catghost]

Some recent concept art!

[Catghost]

Progress Update



We’ll be doing these a little differently from now on, so expect more consistent updates in the coming months. We’ve also added a Story and About page for more information about the game.
This last week has provided breakthroughs in how we’re handling development. We’ve narrowed our focus down and have a clearer goal in mind, and have already progressed more this week than we have in a month.



The hub of our character customization system: Player Journal. We’ve gone through several rough drafts for different ways to handle this, and so far have settled on what this mockup is showing off. Weapon attacks are housed within five weapon categories, with plans to have skill trees for each of the weapon types. These trees will adjust to the character’s attributes, such as class and element, and from there they will be allowed to learn attacks for each weapon.



We’ve also picked back up on world building, after setting it aside these last couple of weeks to work out the mechanics. We’re currently developing the capitol city, with plans of having quite a few unique areas you can visit within it. The statue and archway above are just one part of the many landmarks and important points of interest we’ve got planned.
Storyline rough drafts are being thrown around as well, with the overall plot getting hammered out at the moment, as well as player choices and side plots and how they will interact.



Speaking of player choice and dialogue, there will be a major influence in what these choices will affect in terms of personal stories and NPCs. There will be no morality system or alignment system, and will require a more intuitive aproach than just choosing the good/evil options. We also plan to take a different route for player back stories and motives that involve a less spoon-fed approach than what we’ve done in the past. So far we’re really excited by this, and hope to make even more progress on these ideas soon.



We also did some tribe concepts.



And Class concepts.

Everything else is in the pencil and paper stage, as we work out the different interactions and variables that need to be addressed. So basically there’s plenty more to do, but this week has proven more productive than anticipated, and hopefully that pace will stay consistent from now on.

View on Tumblr

[Catghost]

Progress Update #2



Summer semester finals were this week, which resulted in a smaller update than I’d hoped for.

This week we put down a more solid design for the website through wireframing, and while we’re still working out the details, there’s a good chance this architecture will be the one we build from.





Doesn’t look like much, but that’s the entire point. These wireframes are simple and outline only the most important areas, disregarding any details to get a better understanding of the entire building blocks of the design.

Another major point we’ve tried to really work on in these concepts is layout responsiveness - meaning that Midorea will scale to any screen size you happen to be viewing the site with. Smart phones, tablets, and smaller monitors will display everything to fit their screens, rather than showing a shrunken version of the site.



Here’s a rougher version with added visuals. We’ll likely start taking feedback on our design choices soon, so if you’re interested in giving yours, we’ll be posting information on how to get involved on our social networks.



We also managed to squeeze in some environment concept art.



And another. These concepts are mainly exploring the colors and textures we’ll be using to define the style of our final artwork.
That’s it for this week, but we should have more to show you all the next time Friday rolls around.

View on Tumblr

If you’re interested in getting involved with this project, there are a few ways to get in touch.

[Saygen40]

I love the journal layout for the character page! I also think it's a clever idea that instead of just leveling up, you get to level up certain areas (like the node leveling system from FFX). That's what I'm assuming the bubbling out means, at least.

Looks great!

[Pikmin]

[Catghost]

Wanted to take a minute to let everyone know that Midorea development is alive and well. We let the social networks slide recently, but I’ve been pushing myself to create new content to share with you all consistently, the beginnings of which should make an appearance fairly soon.

Another thing to note is that we’re currently moving away from the working title of ‘v3’ to simply Midorea, as a lot of newer followers of the project are not aware of what it stands for and we’d like to avoid any confusion.

Before I go, here’s a recent sketch of Midorea’s capitol, as well as the development document. Just a small bit of the work we’ve been doing, but hopefully it’ll tide everyone over until we get to show off more.

[Catghost]

Right now we’re in the process of understanding the style and themes we want to achieve with Midorea’s art direction, and I wanted to share a few concepts of a possible design for one of our characters, Isai.

Typically when starting to design a character, we want to flesh out that character’s personality and figure out the rough outline of their appearance. For Isai, the initial prompts were that she was from Cyphirias, and also an owner of an extravagant costume store in the city:

[neomattlac]

Yay! (I don't know how I missed the most recent update)

[Catghost]

Anyone still following along in here?