Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality

We’ve joined the itch.io bundle for racial justice and equality in an effort to help raise money for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund. As of 3:56 on Saturday, itch.io has raised $1,013,090.27 for these two funds, and that’s like the coolest thing ever. For $5 or more, you can grab enough indie games to last you a lifetime, and the money goes to a good cause.

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The Land of Glass Sheet Music

Hey everyone, I meant to share this about a month ago when it was first completed, but if you've managed to take a trip into the latter half of the game, you probably encountered some piano music that my brother composed. We're pretty happy with the soundtrack, and when it comes to the piano throughout, Joe took care to write things that could be played on an actual piano.

He decided to transcribe one of those tunes into sheet music, so if you've got a piano and can read music, please feel free to download and share!

[click to access]

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The Land of Glass Lighting Settings

We've had a handful of people ask us if it's possible to change the lighting and/or tone down the bloom in The Land of Glass. The answer is yes! We figured it would be helpful to showcase what the different settings look like on a fairly bright map. You can see them below.

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2016 Progress Report

Early last year I published a progress report of what we’ve accomplished on The Regret of Vitrerran. Well, another year has come and gone, and it’s time to do another one of these. Much like the first one, these percents are estimations, not all categories are created equal, and we are hoping to have this game done and out within the next eight to ten months.

2016 was a super productive year!

Maps

We’re defining maps as the level geometry throughout Viterran. If you’ve caught any of our Let’s Builds or our blog posts about the various countries across our continent, then you have a strong understanding of what we’re talking about.

Ice level: 100%

Fire level: 100%

Jungle level: 100%

Sand level: 90%

Wind level: 30%

Swamp level: 100%

Water level: 10%

Neutral level: 15%

Battle Maps

We’re defining battle maps as the small, usually 16x16 square maps where battles take place. There are between 10 and 15 per dungeon.

Ice level: 90%

Fire level: 100%

Jungle level: 0%

Sand level: 90%

Wind level: 0%

Swamp level: 80%

Water level: 0%

Neutral level: 0%

Dialogue

We’re defining dialogue as how far a set of characters are through their respective campaigns. It should be noted that all dialogue with the Merchant character—some 17 pages worth—is finished. I have not included those tallies in the below figures.

Kvalt/Tylek: 63%

Pakasoph/Caud: 100%

Herahk/Aros: 63%

Marcus/James: 63%

Art

Artwork is one of the biggest things we have left to do for Vitrerran, yet some aspects of it shouldn’t take that long to do. The portraits are a bit of a time-sink, but the animations themselves aren’t all that bad because once one walk cycle is completed, it’s just a matter of following that path. The mold’s been created, so now it’s time to replicate it.

Level Tilesets: 85%

Character Portraits: 50%

Character Animations: 40%

Cards

We really can’t estimate how far we are on the card front because Vitrerran promises to have a lot of them, and “a lot of them” isn’t a number. We’re making them up as we go in a sense, but the good news is they aren’t terribly difficult to make or churn out.

That being said, we do have at least half of them finished.

Sounds

Of all the rough estimates here, sounds are probably the roughest since I cannot say for certain how many sound effects the game will need. I also can only estimate how many songs we’ll have, but ideally I’d like to cap that number at 20. That’s two per dungeon for a total of 16, and then four more for things like boss fights and our overworld music.

Music: 60%

Sound Effects: 15%

Design

We’re defining design as playable and complete levels from a purely gameplay-driven perspective. This includes all fighting and rewards only.

Pakasoph/Caud: 40%

Kvalt/Tylek: 25%

Herahk/Aros: 25%

Marcus/James: 25%

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Music: We are the Ocean Born

Hey, have some more Vitrerran music why don'tcha!

So, this song is the main theme for The Scarfoam Coast, or our water area. I was trying to channel my inner Alestorm, and while I probably missed that mark by a wide margin, I am happy with what I got going here. This song was super fun to make!

What sets this one apart, I guess, is that it uses a new plugin called Sakura. Well, not "new" to the world but new to Dual Wield Software. It came with some awesome strings, including the violin and guitars you here in this song. I finally have an upright bass, guys. You have no idea how happy that makes me. Got a wicked nice harp too.

Pretty sure the Greyjoys liked to go "we are the iron born," so that's where the title is coming from. I'm finding it harder to pun off of A Song of Ice and Fire things as I make more tunes. I haven't read the books in a very long time.

Anyhow, cheers. Hope you like the song, and as always, follow us on twitter @DualWieldSoft, find us on FB, and some third thing. I dunno.

Song after the break!

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More Music!

Holy crap it's been two months since we last updated anything! I'm...really really sorry about that. Been a crazy year so far. There will be a bigger update on THAT sometime in the nearish future, by the way.

For the now, here are two songs, both of which are on our Youtube channel.

More after the break

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Viper’s Bite

Progress continues with The Land of Glass, this time in the form of a new song. I’m quite happy with this one.

“Viper’s Bite” will be the battle theme music for the Sekhtus Desert.

This song started off as the night-time, rock tune for our Global Game Jam 2016 game. I created the original draft in around five hours on little sleep, and it featured some okay-sounding electric guitar and organ. It was mostly unmixed and unmastered because I ran out of time to do those things.

I liked it then though, and I wasn’t going to just let five hours worth of work sit there like that. So I loaded it back up and re-purposed it.

The okay-sounding electric guitar is now an acoustic guitar–actually two of them, each sounding a little different from each other–and the organ is now a ney flute. Wikipedia says that instrument is prominent in Egypt and the surrounding area.

Like the last song I made for The Land of Glass, there was a nice amount of collaborating at work here. I built the basics, and my brother helped me fix a few things up, partly in pointing out which areas were horribly out of key. I’m a hair tone deaf and have problems with some of that.

And like all my other songs, this one has a nod to A Song of Ice and Fire, The Red Viper being a character from the desert city of Dorn. It’s a bit less in-your-face (and not as clever) as “When Winter Fell” or “A Storm of Sounds,” but it’s the best I managed to do without getting overly wordy.

I hope you enjoy!