This week Bard to Death hit a bit of a dead spot this week due to employment shifts. I just put 30 minutes worth of time into the game to add some more of Jay Jay’s sounds. Last week however, we managed to get a laundry list of things done. I know I am going to leave something out because it’s not fresh on my mind, but here goes.

New in version 0.2:

• Animated character
• Animated monster
• Menu sounds
• Equipable character (weapon only)
• Equipped items change character (weapon only)
• Random barrel loot (only 2 items right now)
• Load screen
• Smarter AI
• Lots of bug fixes

The next update should be in two or three weeks, give or take five. I just landed a much needed job doing php development and currently have my feet in both jobs right now. Once I am back to only one job work will resume and I hope we can keep this pace going from there on out.

Play the alpha demo of Bard To Death.

When my friend Justin “JayJay” Johnson asked me if I was interested in doing a joint project I couldn’t turn him down. We both think very much on the same wave lengths when it comes to creativity, and we tend to push each other well. We were originally discussing the previously announced project code named “Goat Cheese”, when we decided to step back a little more and make a game that we could finish in a reasonable amount of time.

Bard To Death is a semi-humorous take on rogue-likes. The story and a lot of the interactions with the game world are geared toward being humorous while at the same time attempting to present a very real challenge. One of my personal goals with this is to ease the difficulty a bit more than the originals without loosing that feeling of desperation they tend to inflict upon you.

At this point we are a litte over two weeks into development. JayJay hammered out some sounds and we went back and forth taylor fitting them into the game in an attempt to publish this young preview. We had some good laughs and I was really disappointed that I couldn’t add more of his sounds at the moment. Hopefully in the next few weeks I can share more of these with you.

On my end I whipped up some simple models and pulled in the camera and player controls from Aeges Road and taylored them to fit the new game play style. The rest was whipped up in short order. There are a few bugs left in the dungeon generation code, but none that should cause computer trouble, you may find out what I am talking about as you play the game. It is also far from optimized, so I would probably recoment a 2Ghz processor or better, my 1.3Ghz Athlon XP choked on it.

I am very exited about this project. The sound detail is amazing and the code is flexible enough not only to get the rest of the content whipped up quickly, but will also serve as the base code of future RPG and rogue-likes coming from CodeUgly.com.