Greetings and salutations! This week has been a very exciting and busy week. With the announcements at GDC regarding Unreal 4, Unity 5, and Source 2 to a re-direction in my senior projects at school to the completion of the assembly of my new desktop, it has been quite crazy. However, the biggest thing though is The Art Institute's new art grant program.
The art grant program is kind of a retention motivator for students. To be eligible, you must have enrolled full time (12 credits or more) and pass those courses. This in turn will then get you several thousand dollars in extra funding from the school to apply to your tuition in the next quarter. I personally had doubts about it because I wasn't for sure if I would be eligible for it. Money for me has been very hard to come by, but after speaking with Financial Aid, I am eligible, but only if I go up to full time. So after going through my financial plan, I decided to do just that. The only problem is that now I will be graduating a quarter ahead of my previously planned schedule (even though this isn't really a problem at all but a blessing)! This means that now I do not have time to finish my currently planned senior project that I was working on. I discussed this with my program coordinator and he agreed to allow me do something different which will be much faster to build and allow me to have a prototype level ready by graduation.
Enter The Four Heroes! I have decided I am going to consolidate my Four Heroes project into my final project instead, using it as the base. This will allow me to get work done much faster because I can fully concentrate working on Aphrael and the others without compromising time used working on the senior project because they now are the senior project! Let me tell all of you what I plan on doing.
You see, my idea first began to take shape after Sega delayed Phantasy Star Online 2 for the west for no apparent reason. I played the original game back on the Dreamcast to death and had eagerly anticipated playing the second game when they announced it for the west. However, they have yet to answer inquiries as to why they have delayed the game after they first announced it two years ago and never made good on their promise to bring it out here in North America. Sega has been slipping as a company for a very long time now and it will not surprise me if they leave the video game industry or collapse permanently in the near future.
Next, I played a little bit of Diablo 3 for a little bit but got quickly bored of it. I didn't like the presentation and I didn't like any of the characters that they presented as playable. I felt that they were too generic with no style or good presentation to them. I felt that Borderlands (which is a game I don't play by the way because I don't like first-person shooters) had far better and more interesting characters you could choose from.
Finally Destiny came out and it was probably the most over hyped game in history to put it mildly. The game is a mere shadow of what it was supposed to have been. However, I loved the presentation, the user interface design, the soundtrack and the lore (even though it is actually not in the game, you have to go online to find information on the lore which is absurd). I just don't play it because it is a first person shooter. If there was one class where you could fight melee like in Phantasy Star Online 2 in third person all the time, I would have played Destiny in a heartbeat because the game does remind me a lot of the original Phantasy Star Online.
With all of these disappointments (and I know I am not the only one who feels this way; forums across the Internet have expressed their disappointment with all three games that I mentioned), I have decided to make a game that takes the best from all three games and refine those into a new game with my own touches and design style to it. This will be my senior project and The Four Heroes will form the base of it. In addition, the planned workflow for this game is far more streamlined and efficient than the one I had going for my previous project so I will be able to significantly get more work done.
So what does all of this mean for the future? Well, instead of just blogging about my workflow for my characters now, this blog will probably turn into some sort of developer's blog as the project begins to solidify. This is an exciting time now and I have two to three different development engines I can choose from, all that are very good. However, the most important thing of all is that I will be working on something that I feel very passionate about. This is going to be fun and I hope all of you will join me on the ride as I attempt to create something magical, something that me and others have been wanting for a long time now: a Phantasy Star Online like game that feeds that need to go out and adventure in a mysterious sci-fi environment, with the ability to solo offline or party with friends to take down the evils of the galaxy all the while collecting loot that matters and getting super excited over those rare drops that can turn the tide of battle. I hope to put my heart and soul into this game and get it right because in game development, it is very rare if ever, to get something to gel together. I hope I am able to do just that.
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