It is tempting to force a player to follow a strict, linear path. I know. It's something I've caught myself doing on the game I'm curently working on. Even with more or less freedom movement, I've found myself attempting to direct the player. This is not the way to do things in an open environment. How can one expect players to be intelligent if one treats them like an idiot? Developers have to trust the player. Otherwise, we are simply pandering to the lowest common denominator.

The second screenshot looks great, but the texture of the soil do not like.

My wife suggested I continue work on I Dream of Ghosts. So I guess I'm not done with games entirely after all.

AAh, well maybe it would come to change the colors or texture,  to me gave me a wrong feeling.

I've been working on this game again and I'm getting ready to upload new concepts and such. I Dream of Ghosts has morphed into a dark, urban fantasy (heavy emphasis on the fantasy) visual novel. I've dropped the top-down view and I'm going with first-person stills, similar to adventure-lite/hidden-object games. Also, Cinders and Soul Gambler have influenced the direction. Like Cinders, it will have animated backgrounds, music and sound fx.

More coming soon!

I'm seriously considering adding some light puzzle elements to my VN so I spent the last couple nights working on a prototype for physics enabled hidden object scenes. I don't know if physics will add anything but I'm hoping it will. I'll ask coax beg someone try a test scene once the prototype is complete.

Also, here's some more concept art (photobash ftw!). The city of Zargis. This is one of the locations the player will be able to explore.



Original photo (CC BY 2.0): http://www.flickr.com/photos/22746515@N02/2551775794/

So is your protagonist Dave Grohl?

I started writing backstory. I'm not sure how much of it will actually make it into the final game. Here's a few paragraphs:



Order & Entropy Part I
In the beginning, the universe was a single, whole entity. This wholeness existed for only a fraction of a fraction of an instant. It was too big and it’s space too small so it exploded outward. The force of the expansion was too much and it ripped itself apart – Order and Entropy were born.
     At first, Order and Entropy were sibling rivals. Order knew he had to hold the universe together, to form it and shape it. Entropy knew her goal was to ultimately erode it, to spread it out so thin it would eventually disintegrate into nothingness.
     Even in the earliest millennia, he worried. He knew that ultimately, Entropy would win. He knew this. He had all these massive, beautiful stars, filling up the new universe but some day, they would be gone. They’d blow themselves apart, spread out, get smaller and eventually fade away. He put his mind to the problem and created his greatest achievement, the thing he believed would thwart Entropy and assure his victory: the singularity. Over time, all the stuff that is the universe would be pulled into these capsules of space-time and be protected from Entropy forever, or so he thought.
     For billions of years this went on, Order’s golden age. He shaped it all: planets, stars, galaxies and eventually compressed into the jewels of the cosmos, the singularities. The singularities became, not simply vaults but engines of creation and order throughout the universe. The universe split off into other universes and those into yet more and the multiverse grew and grew, filling the void with creation. It was glorious.
     However, time was on Entropy’s side.
     She would whisper in his ear, “the more you create, the more I can tear apart.”
     She laughed at Order's struggles and taunting him pleased her. The singularities might have troubled her for a brief instant but it was not in her nature to care about anything for long. They were an amusing little artefact of Order’s paranoia. They would have been a distracting puzzle if she had been inclined to unravel them. Even so, every now and then she would stare at them, as they were beautiful in a way.
    One day (or megannum, who can tell?) she was staring at a singularity when she noticed something that had slipped past Order: there was a fatal flaw in his design – the singularity was shrinking. Particles were leaking out of the supposedly impenetrable vault. It was so slow so imperceptible that he hadn’t noticed it.
    She grinned and ran to cheerfully inform him of the defect in his beautiful creation.

New character and location concept art.

RODZI
One of the main NPCs, if not the most important. The only Private Scry in the city of Zargis.



PENUMBRA
Land of dead and dying gods. The graveyard of forgotten deities.



ZARGIS
Another Zargis concept. Zargis is a city that sits at a nexus along the interdimensional path known as the Spiral Highway. A big chunk of the action takes place or revolves around this location.