Hey everyone!  Open Beta goes live here in a couple of hours, and I'm beginning to feel the excitement.  Cynthia and myself have worked really hard up till this point, and there's still a lot more to do but it will finally be at a point that everyone can play it.  That fact alone is enough to get me incredibly excited!

As I write this post, Cynthia is putting the final touches on the art that I'm going to take a plug into the game.  There will be no sleep tonight, but who said Game Development came with sleep anyway?  I can't wait to hear what everyone has to say about it, and I'll be working hard to improve the game over the 2 weeks of open beta particularity.

On that note, after Beta is done and the game is 'fully released', I'll continue to monitor feedback and comments in order to update the game.  These updates will be fewer and farther between, but they will hopefully include balancing, player suggestions, and simply more content.  Either way I'm very excited and I really hope to hear from everyone in the coming days!

Hey everyone!  I'm going to be working on All Aboard the Skyship right now, and I'm going to be streaming it live on Twitch.tv!  Head to the link below to check out me developing the game, or feel free to ask me questions in chat about the game itself or the development process!  I hope to see you all on there!

http://www.twitch.tv/xaidenshouni

Lots of new things are happening and it's very exciting!  The first and most visible change I want to talk about is that we're now on GameJolt!  As opposed to using google drive for Beta downloads, the game will be instead hosted on GameJolt!  This way I can track how many people have viewed the game, downloaded it and what it's general ratings are!  Very exciting and thanks so much to the developer of Lovelight for showing me the site.

Second is that we have concept art for characters, i'm not quite ready to show it yet, but it looks amazing and I'll be updating the site constantly within the next week heading into Beta to show off the new art.  So check back often to see updates and see Skyship as it really shapes up into a full released game!  Thank you all again for your support and interest.

Part of me feels conflicted for this post as it's within such a close frequency to the last one, but I want to talk damnit so I'm going to talk!  On Sunday after working on the site, I spent another 5 hours hammering out the game's competitive-cooperative mechanics which ended up being just about as challenging as I expected it to be.  A lot of it involved re-writing a lot of my existing event structure, however a lot of functionality is cleaner and more robust (the big example of which is the code which displays location backgrounds).

What this was a particularly big lesson in is that when creating a prototype, more often then not you will be building off of the prototype moving forward; and that means NOT barely making the mechanics work for the prototype like I did...

Beyond that, Skyship is FEATURE COMPLETE as of Sunday night.  I think the part I'm most excited about is the player marriage system I implemented, and as a reward for reading this blog post I'll tell you how to actually get it to happen!  If two characters spend a net of 3 Cooperative interactions with each-other in the course of one round of play (10 days) and assuming they survive the final event...  The two players will get married to each-other at the start of the first player in the relationship's epilogue.

I know this post wasn't very 'developerey', but I promise the next post I'll get more into the ins and outs of Ren'Py development!  See you all at the Beta in two weeks!!!

I can't believe it's finally here...  After months of hard work and effort, I finally have enough content that I can publish the website!  And only four days after my personal website went live too, who would have thought!?  Either way I'm feeling very good about where both the site and the game is at right now, all I really need now is a few more art assets and I can finally make a trailer for it!

I really hope this website gets people excited for the game; and I'm really looking forward to hearing from you all, so don't be afraid to leave your thoughts in the comments section below!  I'll be using this blog to talk about my development as I get closer and closer to a full release of All Aboard the Skyship!

PS:  I'm sorry I'm starting this blog so late and I have most of the game done and coded already...  ha ha...

PPS:  I woke up and started working on this website on a whim, its 1:00 and I haven't eaten yet so I should probably go do that...