New Orbs and Minions

In Siphon Spirit this week we've got some new orb art! For example, here is the old bomb art.

And here is the redone bomb art.

Siphon Spirit is becoming more nice looking all the time! On the other hand, we have March to the Moon. I got the summons and most of the minions put into the game this past week. Here's a shot of them in action!

Let's see, we've got a couple of golems throwing rocks and boulders, some wolves walking around damaging whatever they touch, some dragons that shoot fire blasts and using Fire Walk. Lastly there are a handful of Fire Wisps shooting off a ton of fire bolts.

I took a hint from Titan Quest on the summons. I played as a nature guy and had wolves and a sylvan nymph helping me out. Worked great until I got to the last guy who killed them all in one shot and I had to respec. That really sucked :( So all the minions in March to the Moon don't have HP. They just live off of time.

By next week I hope to have a big chunk of the abilities finished.

Beginning the Minions

Peter's hard at work on Siphon Spirit. He tells me that a little more than 2/3rds of the levels have been finished now and he's getting some more final artwork done.

As for March to the Moon, I finished the healing abilities and the stuff that you toss on the ground (like fire). I've just started setting up the minions and am getting the art done for them right now. Currently at 100 hours of development.

And yes, we have an image! Here we see our intrepid hero in the cellar fighting rats. He's quite a bit higher level than he should be. That's because I love cheating! Anyways, here he is showing off a few abilities from the Flame skill tree. He's just finished using Fire Walker to spread some flames around and has also just fired off a Fire Bolt which has been boosted with Fireball Split, allowing him to hit more enemies with it.

He can also boost the damage all of his fire attacks do by investing points in Fire Mastery. The bonus will also go to all his minions, so summoner might be a good secondary skill for a Flame primary as it will boost the attacks of the Fire Wisp and the Dragon.

By next week I should have all the minions done as well as all the boosts for minions (special summoner training, paladin leadership, etc.). If I'm lucky I'll get a few other groups of abilities done.

New Blog

We're officially moving! Our old blog is at http://darkeneddreamsgame.blogspot.com/. It just seemed odd to keep posting to Darkened Dreams when we had no plans to continue working on it.

So here's an update. We are still working on Siphon Spirit. Peter is working hard on getting all the storyline in and get all the art as final instead of the temporary stuff he's got in there now. But as it is, there's not a whole lot for me to work on there. Rather than just relax (it turns out I'm not very good at that) I decided to start working on my own game. But wait, I can't have Peter do the art for me since he's busy working on Siphon Spirit. So I've decided to do the art myself and just make it a $1 game on XBox Live Indie Games.

It's a top-down shooter with RPG elements. You start out in the cellar of a tavern killing rats for the barmaid and through a series of events you end up fighting on the moon. As the character spends the whole time marching forward the game is titled March to the Moon. As I had a lot of people asking me how long I'd been working on Darkened Dreams and Siphon Spirit I decided to actually log my hours this time around. I've got 90 hours put into it so far, and the basics are all in.

In order to finish March to the Moon I need to get a few more things done yet. I need to get all of the abilities finished (108 total), create the rest of the enemies and all of their abilities, finish the level art and all of the levels (96 total) and get all the audio in.

I'll have some images up next post!