It’s the first of December. Snow is falling, at least here in Germany, and the 30 days of Nanowrimo are officially over.
For me it was a great experience and a lot of fun again. I had to get up extra early every day to get some writing done, as that’s my dedicated writing time, but it was well worth it.
I reached the 50k word goal and I’m among the winners of this year’s competition again.
It was especially motivating to me to write together with Gavia for some time, as she took part in the Nanowrimo with her own story as well.
Most importantly I finally found the time to work on the second Eerievale novel and I think about a third of the whole novel is written down in my raw draft.
As always I have some mixed feelings, like any author has about his fresh work, when they decide to take a step back and look at it. Overall I’m pleased with this year’s results, though.
I had so much other things to do with the Eerievale project, that I kind of wanted my writing time to be relaxed and a little bit of a break from my other project work.
All I knew about the story when I started, were a few key events and some of the characters I knew from the previous novel. From there I just let the story unfold and see where it lead me.
It worked pretty well and I believe the experience of the first novel helped me a lot with this one.
During this year’s Nanowrimo I wrote a total of 50,472 words as part of the story which is about 225 norm pages.

On a sidenote: Soon we’ll post the latest news about our project presentation that we held on this year’s Euro JagFest.
We’re working on the blog posts.

Regards, Starcat

You may remember when we talked about all the hard work and our struggle with many time consuming steps to get from idea to concept art to game art.
We quickly realized that for the style we’re pursuing we need special equipment to be able to work more efficiently. Of course such equipment, a decent pen display for example, doesn’t come cheap.
We did a successful support auction, some of you were generous and supported our efforts with a donation. Still there is quite a bit left to cover the amount we need.
But we also need the tools, to get somewhere with the project and the clock is ticking. The development must go on.
We figure, it’s more rewarding to support a project when you see results.
So we decided to go the tough road, scrap our personal savings together and cover the rest of the sum to finally purchase the pen display that we needed for months.
It’s a big step for us and risky too, as we don’t have any budget other than through donations at this time, but we fully believe in the project and hope the new pen display will prove to be a valuable time saver to help in the art department.
And to be honest, we hope some of you will enjoy the new material that we create for the project and decide it’s worth your support.
There is still a bit of time left until we can actually show you what exactly we’re working on.
We still plan to present the new project for the first time on this year’s Euro JagFest (27th November in Kaarst, Germany).
As you can imagine, things are very busy and we’re working hard to get everything done for the show.
Those who can make it to the event will be the first to see the game in motion. If you can’t make it, don’t despair. We may add some finishing touches here and there, so it won’t be too long until screenshots will be online after the event.

Those of you, who are looking forward to the Eerievale novel will be pleased to hear that in November I started on the second Eerievale novel in this year’s Nanowrimo competition and it’s going nicely so far. Ten more days to go. I believe the draft of this novel will take more than the 50k words that the Nanowrimo is about, but it’s a good start.
In case you wonder, the first novel is still in first draft stage and hopefully I’ll be able to put some spare time into it in spring 2011 to work on the second draft.
It’s sometimes difficult to put more than a few hours into writing the novel, as my daily work is all about game.
Still it’s very refreshing to get some work on both done from time to time.

Regards, Starcat

It’s amazing how fast time passes, when you’ve got a lot to do. A few months already went by since we went into a new direction with the revival of the Eerievale project as an indie title. Despite very limited resources, we had a lot of progress. As you could read in the last blog entry already, the new game engine is coming along nicely, the design document is getting more detailed and the game world and characters are beginning to take shape through concept art and early graphics. All that is the result of our hard work and enthusiasm for a vision we share. I’m working from early morning till late evening by a fixed schedule on the different aspects of the project. My team colleagues also do their best, as far as time permits. Thanks a lot for your commitment and enthusiasm. It’s very motivating for me and despite the amount of work, it’s a lot of fun to work on the project.
Another source of motivation is you, dear visitor of this homepage, and your encouraging words.
We want to thank all who are looking forward to Eerievale with us and especially those of you, who already supported us with a donation. It helps us very much and to us it’s an extra sign of appreciation of our hard work.

To give something back to the community and to show that getting your hopes up and supporting us is justified, we want to present pictures in motion of the new Eerievale adventure before the end of this year.
You’ll be able to convince yourself of our progress and anticipate the further development with us.

On November 27th, 2010 the Euro JagFest will take place. It’s an annual Atari & Retro game event for fans and developers.
For this occasion members of the Eerievale Team will be there to present the project to the public, show first impressions and answer questions.

Regards, Starcat.

I’ve got some good news about the Eerievale project that I want to share with you.
A little while ago I started to develop a prototype of the new game engine for Eerievale and so far it’s progressing nicely.
The current engine revision is programmed in C, as we hope for a better portability to different platforms.
This revision should also be the foundation to develop the engine further as the project develops. Later we’ll be working on the engine and the design of the game simultaneously.
This way, new ideas can be tested in a game environment right away, finished scenes can be tested more extensively and we get a better idea of the atmosphere of the game.

Gavia is working hard on new concept art sketches for different locations and our main character.
In the meantime I’m modeling the character based on the sketches we already have and animating it for the game, so we can do some character tests in the engine soon.

Regards, Starcat.