Hey everyone! It's way past due for this but here's a new video of the progress that has been made on Nomolos! A significant portion of many of the levels of the game are shown here, including a few of the bosses you haven't seen! I will not include the final boss, of course!
Gradual Games' entire staff will be at MAGFest X this year showing off Nomolos. We hope to see you there!
I'm happy to announce that the final boss battle has been completed. All that remains now is cut scenes, the ending, and probably several months (but possibly less, depending on how testing goes) of heavy beta testing. We reached this point a little faster than I anticipated!
We've completed the final two levels of Nomolos, have graphics prepared for a 5th boss (not previously in the game outline), and are working on the graphics for the final boss. Soon I will begin coding the 5th boss. Progress is going very well and perhaps faster than at any previous stage of the project. Here's a screen shot from one of the final two levels:
It shouldn't be more than a couple more months and the entire game, start to finish will be done except for a couple of cut scenes, the ending, and several months of thorough beta testing (which is going to start happening more concurrently once I've finished the last two bosses). Allowing for life to happen, I think a reasonable release date for this game will be somewhere in the middle of 2012, about 6 months before my original planned release date, January 2013.
For my birthday, my family got screen shots of Nomolos printed on a cake! It was awesome. It couldn't have come at a better time either, as Ravenwolf has recently completed the background art for the last pair of levels, is almost done with the enemies for these levels, and I've transcribed music for it. That leaves: designing the last two levels, programming the last few enemies, developing the final battle with Boulder the evil hippo, and finally a couple of cut scenes and the ending. That should definitely put us right around Christmas time for "draft" completion as I've been saying. Hopefully a few months of beta-testing and overall polish after that and the game can be released!
Progress is going very well on Nomolos recently---we've got the 5th background set and enemies completed, and are soon going to begin development on the 6th and final background set, enemies, and final boss. After that we will work on a couple of cut scenes, probably one at the beginning and the end of the game, and the ending. Even though the whole game is not quite complete, we're also entering a more rigorous beta testing phase. My estimate, allowing for life to happen, is that the game will be very close to completion by Christmas time. I'm not sure yet whether I'll be at MAGfest physically next year, but hopefully Nomolos will have some sort of presence there if not. Either way, Laurie and I are very excited that we're in sight of the end of this long, challenging but ultimately very fun project. And we're looking forward to seeing other people play it, regardless of what form that may be.
Hi everyone! Don't worry, I'm not gone nor has life gotten in the way of Nomolos, I've just been lazy about updating this blog. Recent news includes this Nomolos bead art by Ravenwolf (made without a peg board! pretty good for without a peg board...hopefully we'll get one eventually)
In other news on the game, we're almost done with the first 8 levels of the game. We plan to have 12 levels total, and four bosses. We've just completed the second boss---so progress is going very well! We're about to begin work on the third boss of the game.
A brief demo video of Nomolos was shown at MAGFest 9 this year by Assimilate creator, bigjt_2 (John White). Thanks for making that possible, John! Anyone who was at MAGFest and has found this blog, you may contact me via the comments system or email me at gradualgames@gmail.com if you have questions about how we're making the game or when it will be released, or even constructive criticism.
Here's the video:
The project is moving along at a good pace. Ravenwolf recently completed a new set of enemies, for the firey mountain level, and I've transcribed a piece by Domenico Scarlatti to be the soundtrack for it. I also completed programming the new enemies. Programming new enemies is turning out to be a lot faster than the first few I programmed, as it turns out a few basic movement templates can be tweaked to produce wildly different behavior, which is pretty cool.
Also, a second boss is in the works. The remainder of the game has been roughly outlined, and I think it is definitely doable within a year or so. Keep checking this blog!
