Zlythy Development New Location

I've moved all my progress and updates to my Shadowjack blog: http://www.ghostwheelgames.com

Zlythy - My Notgame

I've made a decision about this game project. Because of delays (with a potential coder), and my own inability to code anything, I've decided to make my project a full-blown notgame. It was barely a game to begin with. On reflection, to a certain extent, I believe I was attempting to candy coat it - to make it more "gamey" and less artsy.

As an artist and musician, I've always felt like the three were separate, which was always a frustration for me. Zlythy will allow me to combine all three. It will be my next project and will include my music and video work as well.

So

It looks like I'm on my own again. The coder got a regular job. It looks a bit like I suspended development for two months for nothing. I'll be returning to Blender as that's what I know and it's cross platform.

I'm going to get back to it as soon as I finish up with a couple other projects I'm working on. Though it could be a while as me and my wife are moving to the UK soon and I'll probably be working a part-time job.

Shadowjack: The Industrial Years, 1997 - 2005

While my game development has slowed down, I've been keeping busy with other projects. Here's another cross-post from my music blog:

UPDATE: As I was digging through all my CD backups (8 years worth) I noticed that the actual dates on the files didn't line up with my recollections of the dates. These songs were actually recorded over a period of 8 years. In fact, the last four songs were all recorded in 2005. There is some overlap with one of the songs on The Fall of Man, which was originally demoed in 2005 but that was around when the direction in my music started to turn back to Doom/Stoner/Metal.Those four songs represent the last spurt of Industrial that was left in me at the time. Plus, the new title is the first I came up with in the first place. :)

10 songs, 10 years 8 years (I'm not so good with dates, what can I say) of Industrial. Coming soon.



Playlist
01. It's Called Easy
02. Angel
03. Lucky Number
04. Elation
05. Worth
06. Bleed
07. Keep It Together
08. Insect Boy
09. You Can't Hide From The Sky
10. Broken World

New Shadowjack Song!

This was previously available as a not-so-great demo on MySpace. You may also notice the all new artwork! It's from a painting I did back in 2006. I tried several times to design artwork for the album and was unhappy with it every single time. I was going through my old art and landed on this piece I painted called Last Denizen of a Dying World. It was perfect - not to literal, not to abstract but still got the concepts and general feel of the music across.

Download I'm a Man (On the Moon): HERE!

The Magazine Format is DEAD, GET OVER IT!

HAS EVERYONE'S BRAINS FALLEN OUT??? THIS IS NOT "COOL!" This is not the 90's! Magazines are dead, we now have a thing called THE INTERNET and WEBSITES!!! STUPID WIRED DEMO

Myst Online: Uru Live

It has returned!!!

ZBrush WIP

I downloaded the ZBrush 30 day trial. This is the first thing I did with it. It's not complete and this isn't the highest subdivision level, mainly because Blender chokes when trying to load such a large file. Plus I had to use decimate on it to knock it down so I could get Blender to do anything beside show a slideshow while moving things around. The low mesh density is obvious around the eyes in the closeup. I'm still learning it and trying to figure out a proper workflow so hopefully, I'll get these problems worked out. I may have to buy more RAM and switch to Windows 7 64-bit for better performance.

Anyway, I wanted to see how ZBrush stacks up to various FLOSS sculpting-style modelling tools. There's no comparison, ZBrush blows them all away. I think I'm going to have lay down the cash for this application.

Zlythy Team

I was fortunate enough to stumble into a real live, experienced game programmer on deviantART! I guess dA is finally useful for something after all these years. His name is Steven Tomlinson and lives in the UK. I believe this is his first indie project however he's work on quite a few AAA games on all the major consoles for the last 15 years as well as PC. Most of his experience is with Windows. However, we are going to be using cross platform, open source componenets so it should be fairly easy to port to Mac and Linux. We are moving from Blender Game Engine to Ogre a proprietary 3d engine that Steven created. I will still be using Blender to create all my 3d assets. Other components we will be using are Bullet for physics and OIS for input. We still need to decide on the audio engine. Maybe OpenAL? I have no clue at this point.

I also have a guy doing some soundscaping. Mattias Häggström Gerdt from Sweden. Here's a demo track he did for me: Zlythy 1v2.mp3
Listen to his music and be sure to download his awesomely chill, free album "We Express Ourselves With T-Shirts" - http://anosou.com/

This is a big shift. I'm part of a team now. I've quickly gone from one guy to a three person team spread across Europe! This is really cool! :D

Caval - 6th World Screenshot

I'm still not completely happy with it but I need to move on to the next world.