Morning Routine

It's after 4 am and it's difficult to go back to sleep. Our development cycles have become more intense as we begin to round the curve of "adeptness" for each of our skills. But becoming decent at development (aka. Sucking slightly less each cycle) brings with it a new set of challenges to overcome and responsibilities to be aware of. The better you become at something the more you naturally have to take care of. We gladly welcome the new set of pros and cons with open arms, as this is the path we set out to search, but the pros and cons are there and they are objectively existent in the universe before us. Another project, another set of hurdles. The more we overcome, the more we can overcome.

Our new development project, code named "Shibe Warz" is a turn-based strategy/tactics game that will be available for PC s by the middle of December. It will incorporate full 2-player competitive networking support so you can pit the characters you've perfected against your friend's favorite selections. The idea of Shibe Warz is to allow complete and utter customization of each of your characters on your side, including weapon loadouts, spell selections, armor and helmet selections, and even tertiary "one time use" items, all of which are dependent upon an overarching "point buy" system. You do not select a "class" for each of your characters. Rather you build your team from the ground up. Do you want a fully-armored spell-slinger whom also has a dagger capable of inflicting massive amounts of damage from the opponent's backside? Spend the points and equip him thusly. Do you want an extremely mobile, armorless healer on your team, incapable of offense but with the balance of having ridiculously powerful healing spells for the rest of your team? Done, with the right loadout combination.

We're very proud of what ideas we've put into the design of Shibe Warz so far and as of the time of this writing all four of us here at Verus are already knee-deep in developing the vision. I've completed the foundational "board" which will be placed surreally but effortlessly into each environment of the game to add a richness and depth to the combat experience. It's similar in style to a chess board, but is comprised of many different interchangeable textures like stone, grass and dirt, etc., and can be resized by the players. The default board size is 10x10, which is a decent amount of room to maneuver within, but much larger, and much smaller, sizes can be selected.

I've also completed the asset list for the Forest environment, including all trees, rocks, saplings, logs, grasses, ferns, etc. We will build the world at the very end of development, but I'm particularly proud of the asset workflow so far, as it allows me to significantly decrease the amount of polygons in the game compared to previous projects, while still maintaining a high level of fidelity in the textures. Not only is this level of captured detail important, but the assets I make for Shibe Warz will carry over directly to our next project (which we have already begun designing), thus saving me time in modeling. I cannot wait to keep working tomorrow.

It's a very, very exciting time in my life now. Never have I worked harder on something with such results. Verus has a great team full of promise, respect, and work ethic, not to mention incredible collaborative skill. This cannot be iterated enough.

Thanks for reading and thank you for playing.

~ Anthony