At long last, some more screen shots! As I wrote earlier I have started a side project and am currently working toward an iPhone game. After much debate and a lot of test coding and graphics I decided that the Soldred Kingdom is a better fit on the PC. I believe I will do an iPhone RPG sometime in the distant future, but for now I am going to finish Soldred and see where this new action on the iPhone goes. So, I kicked things back off this week on Soldred and with a rejuvenated step got some things accomplished.

The biggest gaping hole in this RPG is artwork at the moment, so that is what I have been concentrating on. The tiles were drab, the levels were drab and was just getting frustrating. But I finally took a look at some older games such as Popolo Croise and realised a few places I was skimping and didn’t even notice. Grass tile transitions are pretty dull it you don’t take the time and mix them up a bit, and one transition tile per type and direction simply does not cut it. Variety is the key ingredient.

I also spent some time on trees and other objects. I like shadows for the trees, but forested areas seemed to suffer from having one shadow on top of the next, so I decided that it might be better to leave things as they were in the dense areas and use tree shadows only for trees in the clearing. So to flavor up the forest floor I decided that adding underbrush might have a good visual effect by giving the appearance of dense and impassable.

There is also some UI artwork done, but that is for a later blog. The goal of the stats system is to make a complex game as simple as possible. Basically I am shooting for low numbers with only a handful of stats and several skills to complement. That’s all for now, short and sweet.

The Soldred Kingdom is a turn based RPG with some strategy elements included. It is not intended to be groundbreaking with new features, but rather intended as a creative composition of many existing RPG elements. The game will take place across a few realms as the player actively unfolds the gravity of the situations facing them. The plot will take on some tasteful twists as you try and decide who is friend and who is foe, it’s not always a clear line.