New website, status update
Although I had worked in web development professionally for years, I chose WordPress as the platform for this site for its simplicity, maturity, security, and most of all, because I'd rather be spending the majority of my time on Invisigun Heroes. I fiddled with many templates over the last few months without really being 100% satisfied. A lot of the "simple" templates felt pretty heavy under the hood with complex logic and CSS to handle more situations than I needed.
It was a pretty good opportunity to take a couple days and make my own WordPress template from scratch, as well as brush up on some modern standards and tools. The biggest pleasure came from experimenting with SASS, and it really does make CSS feel more complete and dynamic. Hopefully you guys like the new site, and the best part is that it's lean, mobile-friendly, and since I know the codebase, very flexible for future needs.
One of the maps on the forest planet Nemoris
On the Invisigun front, development has been moving fluidly for months with many major milestones behind me. This is the reason why things have been quiet around here, with the blog posts slowing down. I'll try and pick up the pace in the near future though progress on the game is the #1 priority. At the moment Steam keys have been distributed to a select group of alpha testers, and it's been fantastic to get feedback and squash bugs in a rapid fashion.
The last month has seen the game really come together with most of the final art assets taking shape. Yujin has done an incredible job with the character designs, and the sprite versions with animations are well on their way. I hope to be introducing the heroes one by one very soon!
The next leg of development will focus primarily on network and online play. This was almost completely working about 6 months ago, but I ripped it out in favor of using Unity's brand new networking subsystem. It needs to be integrated from scratch, but should be more efficient and produce fewer corner case bugs.
It's hard to explain, but very recently everything has come together in this leg of development to make Invisigun feel like a real game. I've worked in development long enough to understand prototypes, proof of concepts, mockups, and pipelines – but there is this magical line that a game crosses when it transitions from prototype to game. It's not up to you when it happens.