Poster for Donors

Kay has finally finished the high-res poster made especially for donors to the BBA project!
Our coders are still plugging along on the networking end of the code, as well as consolidating some of the engine code. We may have something neat to show off at Anthrocon - it will be a while before we have anything downloadable though!

See you at Anthrocon!

Engine finalizing and Tech Demo

Well, we've got the "gemstone" engine in hand from Ilya at Valen Games, along with a quick and dirty tech demo he's made to show off some of its game-making potential. Our goal is to have a small but playable walking demo (with some nicely touched up art) for Anthrocon in a few weeks. With some luck we may have rudimentary networking support (walking 2 wolves, chat, login).

Developer's Meeting tonight!

Three of our four-member programming team will be meeting tonight (along with the fourth member via online chat) to flesh out some more of the design specs. The game's engine is in demo-testing phase and will soon be ready for use in our game.

Take a walk with a wolf

Our artists have finished an initial walking series for the wolf in 8 directions. You can move along all major axis points of a compass using the directional pads through a simple terrain environment.

Simple, yes! But vital - we will be testing how the animations flow, add various tweens, and probably implement a run/gallop pace if necessary down the road.

For in-game purposes, your wolf will be very expressive - with hot-key mappings to show various expressions or to move into several stances (playful, aggressive, etc)

Maybe we'll send some screenshots or a video of our mysterious pink wolf in motion - in the coming weeks anyway - so stay tuned!

Walking/Animation Tests

We've got walking animations for our main wolf character (the one you'd customize) working in a sample environment! We can now begin scaling the art to proper sizes - we want a balance between detailed artwork and playable terrain area. If the wolves are too large, you may only fit 5-10 on screen comfortably before it becomes too crowded. So, we'll be testing file size/dimensions while the programmers keep clicking away at the engine.

In the meantime, we're looking for ways to record wolves or acquire some authentic wolf samples....

Further Chronicles

Ilya of Valen Games is in the final stages of his revolutionary game development engine! :)
In a short amount of time (remember: game development time moves at a slower pace than normal time), he'll begin integrating this code with our other team to produce the meat of the game - its interactive content.

Our graphic coders are handling simple tests to integrate character animations and other on-screen movement using our graphics code-base (SDL, Open GL, etc).

The Project Darkstar research is still chugging along - and the most vital part of the game, (the server end!) will be integrated largely using Darkstar's codebase. They've released a new update that allows for scalable servers, among other things (just in case the game gets THAT popular!).

Momentum is high still, thanks to Kay's dedicated fan-base! See, not many programmers (even those at large game studios) are quite used to working on a project knowing that there is a huge fan base dying to play it..

You know what they say : Pressure makes Diamonds.
(That, plus a lot of time)

Project Leads and programmers declared!

Thanks to everyone's donations we have now established a Lead Programmer for our project - the founder of Valen Games, Ilya Olvensky, who created Lunar Domination, will be using his customized game engine to help deliver a great product for all fans of the Blackblood Alliance!

Ilya's Valen Games will be partnering up with Arrowtooth Studios, Red Leader Audio, and Moya Entertainment to form a complete package!....almost! We've also got 2 more coders on board (yet to be named!) who will be helping establish our networking framework using an open source Java code-base called Project Darkstar.


Stay tuned!