The Land of Glass Lighting Settings

We've had a handful of people ask us if it's possible to change the lighting and/or tone down the bloom in The Land of Glass. The answer is yes! We figured it would be helpful to showcase what the different settings look like on a fairly bright map. You can see them below.

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Viper’s Bite

Progress continues with The Land of Glass, this time in the form of a new song. I’m quite happy with this one.

“Viper’s Bite” will be the battle theme music for the Sekhtus Desert.

This song started off as the night-time, rock tune for our Global Game Jam 2016 game. I created the original draft in around five hours on little sleep, and it featured some okay-sounding electric guitar and organ. It was mostly unmixed and unmastered because I ran out of time to do those things.

I liked it then though, and I wasn’t going to just let five hours worth of work sit there like that. So I loaded it back up and re-purposed it.

The okay-sounding electric guitar is now an acoustic guitar–actually two of them, each sounding a little different from each other–and the organ is now a ney flute. Wikipedia says that instrument is prominent in Egypt and the surrounding area.

Like the last song I made for The Land of Glass, there was a nice amount of collaborating at work here. I built the basics, and my brother helped me fix a few things up, partly in pointing out which areas were horribly out of key. I’m a hair tone deaf and have problems with some of that.

And like all my other songs, this one has a nod to A Song of Ice and Fire, The Red Viper being a character from the desert city of Dorn. It’s a bit less in-your-face (and not as clever) as “When Winter Fell” or “A Storm of Sounds,” but it’s the best I managed to do without getting overly wordy.

I hope you enjoy!

The Land of Glass 2015 Progress Report

With the start of a new year comes both resolutions and reflections, and while we aren’t quite equipped with promising any of the former, we can certainly offer the latter. 2015 was a pretty busy year for The Regret of Vitrerran, and we’d like put out a kind of progress report of sorts. For those interested in the game, it’s only fair you know how far in we are; and for us making it, well, having this out in the open is very helpful.

What follows is a haphazard list of what goes into making a video game and how far we’re in. Please keep in mind that the percents are rough estimates and some categories are much bigger than others.

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Development Update

Hey everyone, it's been another long bout of time between updates, meaning it's time for another apology. I really, really don't like these voids of silence, but right now, there isn't much progress to show. That might not change for awhile, either.

I've spent the last month or so working on dialogue, finalizing Herahk/Aros and Kvalt/Tylek's journeys through the first five dungeons we have mapped out. I won't lie, they've been difficult to work with. Those four characters have been my problem children from day one, and that maybe wont' change ever.

However, I've smashed their campaigns into something pretty special, and I think you'll like them, especially Herahk/Aros. I really, really like how they've turned out.

To put this into some perspective, the Word document with all of our video game's dialogue currently measures something like 30,000 words, give or take a few hundred. That's a lot. When Vitrerran is all said and done, it'll be the size of a small novel.

On the reverse, Joe has been working on more menu stuff. The last few major bits of programming we need were the buy/sell menu (complete with merchant) and a crafting menu. Well, they're in the game, though none of the assets are, so there's nothing to show for it yet.

I want to say soon, but drawing portraits for our merchant/black smith aren't high on the list of priorities yet. There's still so much more to draw first.

The future holds more work. Work work work work work work work! I plan on hitting up more levels, fully fleshing out the Sehktus Desert and Arboravin Jungle now that my problem children have fully walked through those areas. The thing is, I've already posted tons of pictures of those places, so more really might not mean much.

I also want to keep some things secret for narrative purposes.

Joe, on the other hand, is working on some card effects right now. We want our special cards to look like the kinds of foil cards you'd get out of a random pack of, say, Pokemon cards. I used to collect them when I was younger and damn it, card games need foil cards. It's just fun. A little random reward for your time.

That, honestly, shouldn't take him too long to finish up. I'm not positive where he'll go next, but I can imagine it'll be more design work or churning out more magic cards. The campaigns will be easier to balance when they're all in place; all we'll need to do is tweak their numbers.

So that's it for now. Vitrerran lives and will continue to live until it's done.

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