The Production Blog of Sword 'N' Board
 
Well, we're a day early, but who cares right? Consider this me trying to make up for being a day late a couple weeks ago.

I was really trying think of what would actually be interesting to read here the other day. While the point of a production blog is obviously to let people know how far along you are in production, the mile stones you're reaching and things like that, it should also be interesting to read right? So I thought I would give everyone a bit more insight into what to expect from the game when it's finished.

A large number of items and weapons, and item customization:

I wanted there to be a large amount of items in this game, for players to find and use, but I also didn't want to do it exactly like previous games have done. While this game is meant to be a sort of tongue in cheek parody of the original Legend of Zelda, I still really wanted to focus on the importance of the theme, and the importance of really playing the game the way that the player wanted to play it. Doing an exact duplicate of The legend of Zelda in my opinion really isn't fun, not only for myself while developing it, but for the player as well I feel.
So, when you've collected a few different items, you'll be able to decide exactly what weapons you want to assign to either of your two attack keys, either O or P. (Get it? That's so OP.... muahaha.... alright I'll stop)

Not only will you be able to decide what weapon you'll be using, with what key press, but using 2 items in different combinations will yield different results as well. But I'll go more in detail about that later... can't spoil everything right off the bat.

Many, large dungeons:

There will be many things to explore in the overworld, and many secrets hidden along the way. If you're going to find them all, you'll want to explore, and explore... and explore. The more you explorer, the greater the rewards! Also, not all of the items you'll be finding in order to survive are going to be found in a Dungeon, so be sure to keep an eye out...

In terms of the size of the Dungeons, they are going to be massive. In terms of layout they are about twice the size of the Legend of Zeldas depending on which dungeon you're in. So while the first dungeon you encounter may still be good in size, it won't be nearly as large as the 2nd, 3rd or so on. And the last dungeon in the mix is going to take a while to explore! Hopefully you've explored enough of the world to find the items you need to survive...

The Dungeons will also be themed I think, no simple color swaps here. We'll save that thing for

So how far along am I?

I have my own production schedule for the game, filled with Milestones that need to be completed in order to move on to the next task, and I'm already about 3 months ahead of the timeline that I gave myself.

The first major task, was to finalize the artwork and program the User Interface (UI) for the game. The User Interface is one of the biggest undertakings for this game, as it controls almost everything that you can do with your character. It controls all of your item selection, your button assignments as well as shows you the items that you've collected so far, as well as the items that you've yet to find.
Not only that, it also displays exactly how much you have of a certain items - for the items that have limited uses - how many keys you have in your possession, and where your health is currently at.

Of course, all of this can't fit on the screen, that would be absolutely terrible, and so it all drops down whenever you press the space bar, or disappears should you press the space bar again. So far, all of this is programmed.

Now, it's all about designing environment elements, some of which will be reused depending on the scene, or color swapped to give it old school feel, while others will be more elaborate to break things up a bit.









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