This blog is more of an update and reminder to myself as well as keeping subscribers up to date on what is happening and there is a lot currently happening behind the development of Valius.

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Last year the development team consisted of 7 Members; 1 Composer, 1 Animator, 2 Writers & 3 Artists. The total now stands at 2, Writer and Composer. It was never the intention to have so many people working on the project or to even lose so many. As most developers knows you will lose members from your team to things such as outside work or education. It will happen but the project started with 1 writer and 1 composer which stands to date.

As a small team, we work much better together as the communication is stronger which allows us to work faster towards our goals. It is and will always be daunting for the amount of work that is required to pull a project such as Valius together.

FEATURES

The decision was made quite recently to cut loose a lot of the features from the game to allows us the time and space to focus more on the story. The features dropped are as followed;

Achievements
Side Quests
Journal
Properties
Guilds
Battle Arena
Guilded Marquee

It was quite sad to lose these features but since having dropped them, the project has a fresher and better feel to it at least in the testing.


STORY & CHARACTERS

At the beginning of the script writing process it was always apparent on where we were going with the story but not how we got there. So the foundations have been worked on meticulously until it felt right but then we stepped back and had a look at it and started to pick out the weak areas constructively and alter them when they needed altering or dropped them completely.

Without revealing the story or too much information on the game, we have had a lot of character shift arounds in terms of names, titles, background history etc. It is very important to us that when a character comes across that they deliver the lines not because it's forced from the writing perspective but because of their character background that makes their personality more real and believable in their being.

So as we created characters, we created their background then their history which helped with the scripting and dialogue knowing what a character would say and when.

ART STYLE

Since losing three artists and an animator, it was quite a blow to the art style of the game but we found a happy medium with the pixel art that it is and try very hard to create new rather than use existing resources from the internet of which there is so many.

From the very beginning of production we, the writer and composer, came to the project with a mind in movies. The use of camera work and scripting in the game is purely down to our knowledge in movies having watched and made several so when we tackled with the style of Valius, we go at it with a clapper board.

MUSIC

The project has been quite lucky to have such a talented composer on board helping in every way they can even out of the studio.

It was never really stated on how many tracks the project would require but at recent production meeting we came to a total count of 80 tracks so far which is quite surprising for a first project but each track has so much story to them in design and area of the game it would be insane to drop any tracks.