RadianHelix

Morningstar OST Exploration III

A main battle theme, intended to loop.

This is a continuation of the exploration of the audio landscape of the game. Still playing with the Taiko drums established in Voices of the Deep, this time to the extreme, adding french horns and a combination of Male and Female Gaelic voices. 

It begins with some building anxiety and trepidation, then launches into an assault of running rhythm and blaring battle horns, before a soft landing that loops back to the beginning. 

Morningstar OST Experimentation II

Finding an OST that is unique to the game's identity is something I've been thinking about since the project was first inspired. And now, after two years of pre-production and about 7 months into full production, I've got a track that I feel will be in the OST, and help inspire the style. 

Been experimenting with music the last year, with much less time than I'd prefer around art tasks on the game and generic business stuff. But I'm learning how not to suck, and finding my own uniq...

Morningstar Update February 2023

February was a brutal month for the company, with 5/6 of us affected by COVID in the first two weeks.

But despite that, we've made a lot of really good progress towards merging the two halves of the game mentioned last month into the new main branch on Plastic. 

You can see in the Gifs attached that the code which drives Buildings and Cliffs is now complete. 

This system w...

Morningstar Update January 2023

January 2023 is what you'd refer to as, "a month."

It had its ups and downs with really amazing and necessary progress, but good god, the punches have just kept coming. 

To end the month, everyone is either recovering from Covid-19, or currently has it. My fiance has it, so it's just a matter of time until me and my toddler daughter do. Allegra is recovering. Curtis currently has it. Kent didn't get it thankfully but is suffering a neurological issue. The last man standing is...

Propaganda Update -- Rev3 Playtesting Notes

So far, Propaganda has been mostly centered around its single player mode, which is a hard thing to design a board game to do, even though it is an overwhelmingly requested feature you see come up in every board game kickstarter. And I personally really enjoy the single player mode, since I can enjoy a game by myself just fine. 

But,Propaganda is also a multiplayer game, where several people can be playing within their own little player vs game bubbles, and reaching across the aisl...

Morningstar Updates November 2022

November has been a very productive month, preparing for the largest merge of assets and code the game has experienced yet. 

We have 4 major landmasses rising out of the depths of the development ocean, and they are all starting to mature simultaneously.

#1 -- Curtis's Terrain Editor, Layer Sorting Algorithm/Binning for buildings and objects, the Shader Based Tilemap Accelerator, Procedural Generator, Dynamic Sprite Atlas, Tile Ruleset System, and the Sprite Editor & Titl...

Rev 3 of Propaganda! In Testing

This is quite a process.

I took some video of the cutting machine doing its work that I'll need to edit together into a little youtube short here soon. 

Printing cost $52.50 at Kinkos, and they aren't perfect by any means, but it's fine for print on demand. 50$ is 2x the cost of getting the cards print at TheGameCrafter.com or PrintNinja. So this is probably the last time I do testing this way, as the machine I have is less than ideal for the task, and costs as much as just g...

Shillohette C4 Doing Its Thing

It's certainly not perfect by any means, but it's pretty cool. 

I've tried about 12 revisions getting the Cameo 4 to behave itself and do perfect circles, and no luck. But the cards themselves are now spot on.

I'm still working out the ideal method for the circles now -- I think having those die cut would be ideal, and we can just reuse the extra space without the dials to fit 3 card...

Morningstar Updates October 2022

October was a critical month where A LOT of behind the scenes stuff got done, but not as much visually stunning as last September was with all the new isometric art.

This month's list of major milestones includes:

#1 -- Kent got the sprite sorting system for characters integrated with James's unique system, and we now have a working character generation UI which can save & load as well as produce random and custom characters. 

#2 -- James has reworked some of the qu...

Board Game Progress for October 2022

We have two games in the works at Radian-Helix besides Project Morningstar, this time on physical media. 

The first is "PROPAGANDA!", our Authoritarian Apocalypse Simulator, and he second is STAVE, a competitive Magical Poker type game. 

The biggest hurdle in testing a board game is just pen & paper prototyping. 

All the printing and manufacturing is usually reserved for the final steps. My games tend to get a minimalist pass first that I have printed on d...

Propaganda Update!

After some strenuous testing over the past couple months, Propaganda has a Revision 2 ready to print for another round of testing and revisions. 

If you haven't had time to look at the older post introducing the game, the premise is simple:

You have EVENTS and ACTIONS. You start with 5 actions in your hand, and draw an event.

Events are what is happening to the regime on any given turn.

2022-10-24 23:39:07 +0000 UTC View Post

September 2022 Updates!

Wow, September was a busy month! 

Lots of art got made and our world got a lot more lively. 

First of all, the Firearms are done for Vertical Slice, and this is just a selection of the final total from each Era:

2022-10-01 19:34:58 +0000 UTC View Post

August 2022 Update!

August has been a busy month! 

STAVE, the card game we've been working on since 2019 is done and ready to publish. PROPAGANDA is the next board game that's ready to enter production phase, balancing, and play-testing. And finally Morningstar has been super busy. 

Curtis is still hammering away at the big Procedural Generation system. 

This is a quick flowchart of some...

PROPAGANDA! -- A Game of Truth, Lies, and Domination!

How do you guys like board games?

Well, I enjoy making them. 

PROPAGANDA was a moment of inspiration that hit me back in March this year while I was watching the news and recovering from COVID. I had the house to myself for a few days while my 2 year old and lady were up in Phoenix, and desp...

Updates for July 2022 (Part 3)

https://youtu.be/6H88ZVAavQw

The next important feature is from James, who has been hammering away at multiple systems vital to producing our game. 

The first and foremost is our animation system, which allows us to display our largely single-frame static sprites and have them perform all kinds of actions, like slashing, jabbing, shooting, getting hit, dying, etc. 

The reason we wanted these ...

Updates for July 2022 (Part 2)

We're working a little bit ahead on a future feature that hasn't broken ground yet beyond initial concepts and art assets: the World Map & Travel system.

Normally the game is played on the Local Map, which is the isometric world on individual buildings and characters walking around, chopping trees and mining out resources. But as you head off the edges of the local map, your caravans enter ...

Updates for July 2022! (Part 1)

Morningstar has been hard at work upgrading prototypes to full production tools and implemented features. 

Morningstar has been hard at work upgrading prototypes to full production tools and implimented features. 

First up are the Character Elements that make up our procedural character...

Possible Main Menu Theme?

Something dark and foreboding to go with our epic and grand theme? 

Music!

Haven't had a lot of time for additional scoring work, but I've been tooling around on weekends when UI work isn't drowning us. 

May 2022 Update!

May has been a very productive month, and our two new coders have helped accelerate things tremendously. 

Most of these innovations have happened behind the scenes.

The biggest source of performance woes in a game like ours comes from the JobDriver, Pathfinding & Navmesh Rebuilds/Path Cost Recalculation, Lighting, and Sprite Memory.

Solving those big tech risks is among the first huge Full Production hurdles past the prototype, which we're tackling now. 2022-05-30 22:37:01 +0000 UTC View Post

OST Scoring Has Begun!

While it is the icing on top, the score of Morningstar's OST is an important step. 

I've been playing around with my piano and noodling on some sounds that will work for our game. basically on the hunt for a main theme and lief motif that will fit the atmosphere of this gigantic, timeless world, full of alien life and human trials & tribulations. 

It's hard summing up a universe so big and complex as ours. The SciFi of the 90s with their vast and optimistic theme son...

April 2022 Update! Lots of Progress!

This has been a long, crazy month, but it is all good stuff.

James and Curtis have dug in and begun working on their respective sides of the project, while Kent continues his. Allegra has wrapped up her special terrain kit for our newest and arguably most important piece. And I have been busy with a lot of misc tasks related to running the business, keeping everyone on the same page, and organizing our milestones. 

Lighting System

Morningstar ...