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I'm thinking I'm glad I blew off the MSM, shorted the dollar and hedged in crypto / hard money.  Maybe I can fund Neofeud 2 with the profit $$$

I may have to go back and revise some of my Neofeudal dynasties, though...  Trump-Giulanis scale up the steep Forbes trillionaires list.

Lol, nice work man.   Gotta relieve some tension after a long climb eh.

Looking real spiffy man!  Hope to see more of this soon.

Neofeud is comin' for you!  All alpha testers, go ahead and check your message boxes.

Some eye candy for yall's while you wait:



Neofeud 80's femme fatale babes, you better work.

   

Rags to riches.

Wow, thanks Dave!  That would be a huge honor as a big Wadjet Eye fan.

I'll try to get a version out to testers tonight / tomorrow.

Thanks, and yeah, I'm going to need some testers now to test the action out.  Send me a message if interested!

Looks sweet!  Haven't seen many cartoon-style AGS games like this one.

Thanks, Matsui!

Everybody was gun-fu fighting! 

Big news, other than the world about to explode due to upcoming US presidential election, is that the NEOFEUD (ALPHA) IS FINISHED!

As promised, I set a hard target of the end of October for the first full version of the game. This has a lot to do with making sure that Neofeud is pressed, packed, and shipped on time for our family's big life changes coming up. And YES, we've met that deadline! (crowd cheering) Thanks in no small part to all of you patrons.

What this means is that the story and a rough draft of the game from start to finish is completed and ready to be tested. Here's a play-by-play:

-Story: 100% - The storyline for the Neofeud game is finished. There will be tweaks here and there as we go into polishing and testing, but no major changes or additions will be made at this point.

-Backgrounds 100% - All of the world-art is in the game, and let me tell you, this was a job as rough as being Trump's PR manager given the 1366x768 resolution. Highly recommend playing this on a big screen if possible!

-Characters 100% - All of the character full-body sprites are in game running around and portraits are hung up in gold trimmed, diamond-studded frames.

-Programming 100% (rough draft) - All of the pointing, clicking, running, jumping, combining of cats with moustaches and other gameplay is coded in hand-crafted Java-analog. The debugging process of course will take longer but that's what testing is for!

-Music 95% - Thanks again to Minxilla. Will need to actually go back and insert some musical cues but hopefully it won't be a ton of more work.

-Sound 70% - Still need to add in a few more sound effects but this will happen during testing.

-Voice Acting - Now actively seeking voice actors / actresses again! If you had auditioned for Neofeud parts back in March or at some point since then, I'll be checking back in with potential VAs.

The current target for release is December, although it's difficult to give an exact release date as we want to have a solid game with strong voice acting and as few big bugs and crashes as possible before letting this cyberpunk ship sail.

The price of the final game has also not been set, but again, if you've contributed up to or over the price of the game in Patronage, then you can receive it for free!

If you're interested in voice acting or testing the game, send a message or post here!

My penchant for Giger has a lot to do with his connection to and work with Ridley Scott, really.  If Scott is one of the most influential filmmakers on not only film but everything from art to fashion stemming from his work in the 80's, then he absolutely has to give a cut of the prize money to Giger. 

Based on my Google autofill, and the fact he's my go-to artist when I need to namedrop a high-class painter to appear smart, it has to be H. R. Giger.



Besides also just loving the art itself, I feel like he blew open a Pandora's box of visual ideas and emotions that had been sealed off, or 'blown out the airlock' as the case may be, until Giger went into the deep-space of his own chronic nightmares and retrieved them. 

As far as influence in my own work, I'd say the intricate, ambiguously biomechanical greebling, and cyberpunk surrealism is liberally basted all over Neofeud.

@AnasAbdin: Done.

@Cassiebsg: Yeah, you get to be collateral damage down there!  Bummer! :o

@Blondbraid: Yeah there's a lot of that in Neofeud.

Looking real awesome man!  Very glowy, almost like Tron on Mars.

Now we just need the space demons from hell to come out and ravage the city.

This is how you rig a Presidential Election in Neofeud:



(Click here for the big version)

Don't forget to blame it on Russia!

If you say 'pixel art' sometimes that can refer to pixel-by-pixel placement, which is more necessary if you're at a super-low resolution like 120, 64, 32.  It can be difficult and time consuming at higher resolutions and with a large number of scenes.

'Hand painted' can refer to physical paintings / drawings scanned in, or painted with a digital tablet or mouse in Paint, Photoshop, Gimp or other software.  Whether digital or physical, you're painting these things using your hand.

Painting in a 'traditional medium' or 'physical medium' would be art using actual paint, pencils, pens, charcoal etc..

A 3D rendered background as found in most AAA games -- Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, etc -- are *not* hand-painted, since the texture, lighting, and sometimes even the geometry itself is computer generated according to algorithms. 

I personally paint backgrounds in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet, which acts like a digital paint brush.  I don't go pixel-by-pixel myself.

But whatever gets the job done, really!  As long as it looks good, how you do it isn't a huge deal.

Thanks Cassie, Blondbraid and Anas.

AnasAbdin: I agree. I spend long hours on my little backgrounds. I can't imagine how much time SS spent on this one. Even though there's a lot of copy/pasting involved in creating such backgrounds but still the finishing touches must take days 

For the "Royal / 0.1-percenter" locations, I was into the concept of differentiating them from the "Commoner / impoverished / 99%" by making all of the High-City castles, skyscrapers super-polished and super symmetrical, with a lot of straight-on, almost worshipful shots.  The Blomkampian terrestrials, on the other hand, are almost all asymmetrical, patchwork shanties and collapsing Affordable Housing Projects with completely random -- but also completely personalized and creative -- uses.  Even the characters are patched together, including the cyborg protagonist and the robot delinquent kid with his mix-and-match chassis and limbs.

The symmetry helps a lot, as painting the backgrounds in around 4000 x 2000 then downsizing to 1366x768 does indeed take *epochs* of time and feels like running a marathon with a ball and chain at times.  Especially with scenes like the Fuclrum Palace whose sheer grandeur is the paramount feature -- I feel the architectural splendor and hubris require that insane level of detail to really deliver the message of utterly astronomical wealth and power.  I'm trying to visually convey what the world 'trillion dollars' actually means, as I think it's not something people can really comprehend, even though we hear it thrown around a lot, in the news.  What would a royal, multi-trillionaire in the year 2135, live in?  It would probably take a week at least for each of those backgrounds, so symmetry allows some time-savings there.  But yes, the finishing still takes a lot of time.

@Cassie: Soon, soon!

Great work there!  All the fruits making me hungry.

Glad to hear you've found that puzzle designer!  I'd pitch in but I'm fairly swamped finishing my own project at the moment.

Good luck!

Great job there, must've taken hours to get all the orchestration orchestrated!

I was gonna say, maybe do a Scooby-Doo skid-stop, but that's a lot of extra work.

I kind of feel bad for that one left behind, though.  It will be tough to be the only Russian who didn't catch Hillary Clinton.

Looks great!  Good luck kickstarting a retainer fund for John Williams.