Update for Caverns of Underkeep.

I’m not an artist by any means so what you’re seeing is what I’d call passable programmer art. When you have no budget to hire someone you gotta do it yourself I suppose.

The images where made by first sketching on paper, and then taking a photo with a digital camera and loading it into Paint.Net - I then created a new layer and drew an outline of the original sketch. I couldn’t just use the original sketch as the pen lines where a bit messy and I drew the images on lined refil pad - Lesson learned.

I had to use a mouse to do the outlines, which was a bit hard and why the linework isn’t too smooth. If I plan on developing my artistic side a bit more I think I’ll have to invest in a graphics tablet.

Programming wise I’ve been reading up on PHP the last few days, so I can save game information into a mySQL database. I’d like to find out how many games of Caverns are being played and to what frequency the different character classes are being chosen etc.. I’m also going to start building the ‘Hall of Records’ soon which will be viewable in the town and will list high scores and other statistics.

The most frequent feedback I’ve received with regards to the game is that people really don’t like having to walk all the way back to town to sell their stuff - So I’ve added elevators. There’s one on every level (except for the last one) and you can travel between levels freely, provided you have already visited the level you want to travel to. This should cut down on commute times.

The date for the beta release is going to be fri 8th feb 2008.

I also want to start on a new project next month, I want to do something much shorter than Caverns - A two week project would be nice.