Art UPDATE!

Another Art Update! Woohoo! This time its a little bit of concept art for the first town!

Enterable House!

We have added a new platform to traverse between the tiers of the town in this image it is the red platform:

It will bounce you up onto the above tier to get down you just walk off the edge for now, this may change. We are thinking the placeholder red cuboid could be replaced by a slingshot controlled by an NPC:

To enter the house all you do is walk up to its door:

Et voila:

Nice artwork Mr. Nose-man!

NPC 3D Concepts

After more development into the character we came to this finished model - 

After working from the sketches we made of the 'farming' NPC's I made a nice little 3D model of it, fully rigged!

Coloured some NPCs

New Ideas - Animal Companion system, Town Tier system

Continent system

We are planning on separating the world into multiple continents each containing multiple towns and their own race of NPCs. They will also contain new guilds (explained below).

Animal Companion system

We wanted to include mounts in the game as well as certain quest objectives that caused companions (the common analogy was a lost cat) to follow you to a location. We thought maybe these two things could be combined together into a progressive pet system. You gain certain companions that will initially float around behind you or hang onto your back not actively fighting but giving buffs in certain stats etc. This pet will become your friend (note that BoT has a babel fish alike translation system installed into him that allows you to speak to animals) and will eventually fight for you. This new follower will eventually become large enough to fight for you. Since the pet is your equal you will have dialogues with it and can even wield it in combat. The mounts will be used to traverse the larger dungeon spaces and will come out of BoT's eye. The animal will transition between different forms - pet, follower and mount - so as to make it portable without locking it in a tiny ball with no fresh air.

Town Tier System

We wanted the town to be big and explorable but at the same time feel navigable without having to use a mini-map. To solve this we came up with a sort of tier system within the town. The town will be made up of large floating islands. Three (possibly) of these islands will contain the NPCs living space, one being the residential district, another the market district and the last containing the guild hall and services. All buildings will be enterable if not at the start then once you complete the town's dungeons. The town could contain errands that don't require travel into the dungeons but they will contain the dungeon entrances themselves. Your spaceship will also be accessed from the town platforms via Catapult. The guild hall is the central building in each town and decides what that town specialises in i.e. the guild of miners, blacksmiths and librarians. These guilds will have an overarching story line connecting them and their towns. On the same tier as the Guild hall will be three other buildings each giving different services. E.g. the Explorer's outpost could give you side quests.

Now Featuring...

So it's been a while since anything has been posted here so quite a lot has been added to the project:

• Bot now moves based on Unity's physics engine rather than simply translating with vectors through space, this results in much better collision detecting. (stops what I like to call the box rocket)
• Added a box that bot can pick up and move around, you can choose to drop it or throw it. Bot moves slower while carrying the box.
• Platforms now have the ability to move (if we want them to) or be sloped (maybe even both?) and now look a lot less like generic grey boxes.
• iTween! We've started using great little plugin for Unity that allows easier "tweening" of moving things (and much more), for example moving the camera smoothly. (http://itween.pixelplacement.com/index.php)
• Town. The basic outline for movement around the town area has been fleshed out. When in town the third dimension is opened up to you with the camera somewhere between top-down and side-on.
• Collectibles have now been added (Cogs, Floppy Disks and Coins) although for just now they only increase an invisible integer so you have no way to show them off...
• Combat has been added at a very base level. Bot can equip or unequip a weapon (currently a sword) and have a rather unfair fight with a Nose-Man (NPC) where his only defence is the Defence variable we set. It works by comparing Bot's Attack to the defender's Defence and vice-versa. Bot's attack is determined by his level, weapon, any other buffs and a random number within a certain range (also dictated by level). Currently Bot has the potential to level up and lose health and be buffed by various things but these things aren't in the project yet.
• A simple switch mechanism has been added which can control various objects within the game and can be activated by either Bot or the box.
• Bot can die and respawn at a checkpoint by either falling off a ledge or colliding with the imaginatively named "Death Object".

P.S.

We will hopefully posting more frequent updates (probably every Friday or Saturday or so...if we               remember) and may even start including actual screenshots and game footage and stuff. :)