We're done with school (almost)! Check out the culmination of our work!

Wahoo!  We've survived!  Am I flunking?  Who knows!

Here's a link to the revamped Bala website.  On it is a video, information, screenshots, and a demo of the game!  Check it out!

Life Witch 2.0!

I'm very happy to show off Life Witch's new model!  She looks great!  For various things like the website and presentations, I took some nice renders of her new design.

Life Witch lovin' on her scarf-arm babies!

Life Witch throwing some knives!

Life Witch whippin' out the bat shield!

Jumping for joy!

We got her done waaaayyyyyyy behind schedule for various reasons, but I couldn't be happier now that she's done!  I'm very proud of how she turned out.  Thanks, Hank!

Big text update about everything and nothing in particular

Angelica here.  I just went through the blog archive and the posts on this blog don't do what we've done justice!  I'm going to take this opportunity to dump a bunch of links.

The Bala website is up and you can find it here.  On it are all of our social media outlets, a link to this blog, and a list of everyone on the team.  It needs updating, but it exists!

You can download and play the real game here!  By now, this version of Bala is a little outdated, but you can still take a look around and have some kind of experience.  In the folder is a build of the game for both Mac and PC.  We haven't yet resolved the resolution issue with the Mac build, but we're working on that. 

Don't have time or the means to play the game?  That's okay!  We have a video of the whole thing! Again, it's a little dated, but it's a video of the downloadable build above.

Additionally, I post regular updates on my personal blog, located here.  My latest post is about Life Witch's new shield.  Here's a preview of it below, but you can check out the whole process of designing it on my blog (it's not too long. I'm a very simple-minded person).  Preview:

Ain't it cute!

To my knowledge (and doing some digging through blogs), my teammates have not been updating their blogs.  Oops!

I hope these links help to fill in some gaps!  We'll try to be better about that kind of stuff in the future.

Nothing A Little Digital Elbow Grease Can't Cure...

What’s happening good people out there?! It’sa me, David Houston weighing in this week on the Bala blog-o-sphere. I hope everyone is doing well out there where ever you may be. No matter how hard things get remember to stick you chest out and handle it! You'll only grow stronger from it in the end! Now that I've got my usual motivational rant out the way it's time to get down on some new art stuff!

So this time around I’m going to show you all the ways we’ve been beautifying the tutorial level. With Hank and Angelica steady working on the foliage and a new mesh for the environment, it was up to yours truly to clean up the numerous architectural objects littered throughout the forest. Behold!!

The general idea is that these are magical ruins of a sort where Life Witch has been pent up for god knows how long, so they needed to reflect some of that general wear and tear that would come from a land mark that was just sitting there; so almost everything is littered with some moss and a few cracks that would come with general weathering.  I also put in a lot of gritty textures on the rocks to give it a well…rocky sort of feel. It’s old; it’s simi-natural, so it shouldn’t be clean!  There’s also a lot of wing like metal structures to help drive home the use of the wind power on specific objects.

I also threw in a bunch of rune type engravings to show some semblance of an ancient magical language and or culture. I looked into some Egyptian as well as Celtic markings to draw inspiration for the engravings and pretty much went from there. I also tossed them on things like the wind pedestals and elevators to help draw attention to them as magical items and to help unify them with the other “man-made” objects throughout our tutorial level. I think I’m most proud of the large brazier pillars in our boss area; they have got a lot of really fun markings on there that turned out pretty good!  One more fun fact on the wind elevator is all the grey parts on the surrounding rings and the magic circle are actually transparent in the engine to help draw out that mystical feel!

Last thing I touched up was the wooden drop bridge as well as the little raft that floats in our waterhole! I didn’t do anything that was overly special here. I went in and added some deep dark lines to show the groves in the wood as well some general shadows to help add some depth and presence to the wood. Well that's enough for the time being kiddies! As the world of Bala turns onward, look forward to more good stuff soon. 

So until next time...Wealth, Health, and Insight!