Middle of Week 3

I went to high school in the late 80's. Now, I'd been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was 10. My parents bought me the original red box starter set when it first came out in an attempt to encourage me to read at a young age--which obviously worked. But the stigma associated with people who played D&D at that time was grossly inaccurate and very negative. So when we used to play during lunch in high school, I was always the kid saying, "Hide the books!" when a group of girls would walk by. My friends would respond, "Huh? What?" totally oblivious. It's nice to see the social acceptability of being a game obsessed nerd change. Today, it's not nearly as embarrassing to wear a World of Warcraft shirt around, for example. But still, I'm old school and I still carry around a bit of that hesitation.

As just a coincidence of how things turned out, most of the artists on the Dawnshine team are women--either recent college grads or graduating seniors. I still remember the first meetings I had with each of them separately and later as part of the group. I was a little nervous about how to bring up the Neg Wath. So the Neg Wath are this ethnic group. They're sort of like the Celts, but far more cannibalistic. Even more disturbing, they use necromancy to preserve the bodies of the dead. That's a fancy way of saying they raise zombies, then eat those zombies when they get hungry. Yeah, pretty gross. So how do you bring that up in a conversation with a young lady that you don't know that well without coming across like a total weirdo?

Well, turns out the exact opposite happened. The artists on the team love the Neg Wath and have pushed the concept to even more disturbing levels. We had our art meeting sunday and they're drawing up concepts of Neg Wath with human bones weaved through their hair, of armor made of human bones, and all sorts of disturbing things. I announced to the team something like, "You're all sick puppies and need help."

Seriously though, I'm really happy with how the Neg Wath concepts are coming along. The art team is doing a fantastic job. We're getting really close to starting to model some concepts and having our first 3d art assets in the game.

On the programming side of things, we're mostly testing the engine and seeing what we can do with it. We don't have much of our own systems working yet, just the default HeroEngine stuff. Last night, I recruited another programmer with a 4 year Game Programming degree from Devry. He's going to have to be the last programmer I recruit on the team or else the programming team is going to be too large to manage.