OMG

I'm sure most of you have long written off this game as just another project, destined to go unfinished. Today, you're all wrong. Though it has taken years, many trials and tribulations (which I wont detail here, life happens to everyone, etc...blah blah) we're finally about a week away from releasing not just a demo, but the entire first episode (well, not exactly the first episode, youll see,) fully playable. Currently, not in dev-mode, its clocking in at around 4 hours or so of gameplay.

Long ago it was decided that a full length, 40+ hour rpg was just too big a task for two guys with full time jobs to pull off within a reasonable amount of time. We didn't want to get discouraged by giving ourselves insane goals, and then fail to achieve them, so we decided to split the game up in to far easier to manage episodes. Besides, episodic games are all the rage now, anyway.

What we've done is focused on finishing the entire 3rd chapter, The Road to Gobbler's Knob, and making it as awesome as possible, just so we can actually finish and release something. It prolly seems weird that the first release is actually episode 3, but as work progressed, we realized that we were having the most fun working on that section, so we decided to finish that, first.

At this point, we're about 95% done. The only thing left is to tweak the art on some enemies and polish up the final dialogue. Ideally, within the next week or so, we'd like to release the first final build and (hopefully) have people play through it and give us feedback so that we can polish and tweak everything as best as possible.

Also, though there will be a full, dedicated post on this a little bit later, we're looking for people to help finish the rest of the game. The main thing we're looking for is tileset/world/environment artists and character spriters.

As you've probably noticed, most of the sprite work so far is from other sources that we've appropriated and modified for our purposes. In most places, I think we've managed to blend everything together to create a pretty awesome and unique look, however, we would really prefer to be using as much completely original artwork as possible. Unfortunately, it seems that we pretty much suck at creating tilesets completely from scratch. So, if you like Weed Universe, are totally awesome at sprite work and environment design and want to help, please hit us up either here or at vlexin@gmail.com.

More to come soon!

<3 Shanghai Pete