We took a little hiatus last week to do some contract projects, and as such didn’t get as much progress on our two new games as we might have liked. However, some progress was made in the art department for both games. And for us (not being artists), any sort of art that is complete is a big step.

For “Game 2″, we kicked around a variety of themes for the game. As we created the prototype completely abstractly (meaning, there was no story, concept, or theme in mind when we created it), we wanted to see if we could create a theme that would give the game a little bit of personality, something that we feel is very important to our games. Again, as our handicap is art, we settled on something that doesn’t quite have the personality of Sheepstacker, but should still be pleasant and fun.

For “Game 3″, the bulk of the technology for the game is actually complete. The next step is to bring it all together to create our first playable prototype. Looking forward, this game seems like it will require a lot of small tweaks to get exactly right, as there’s a balancing act to keep all of the elements of gameplay from overpowering each other. It should be an interesting experiment.

In addition to the technology, I’ve successfully modeled, unwrapped, and rigged all of the characters we’ll need for the game! The models themselves are very simple as we want to get as many of these guys on screen as possible. The biggest problem was keeping the vertex numbers down. With low vert numbers, Unity (our engine) will be able to batch the drawing of nearly all of our characters. This will greatly help performance, which is something we’re going to need help with since we want to have oodles of skinned and animated characters on screen.

The next steps for us are pretty clear: For Game 2, Shannon will continue creating mock-ups of our user interface and gameplay screens. Since the bulk of the gameplay programming is actually finished for that game, I’ll be focusing on assembling the different components for Game 3 to create a playable prototype. In addition, I’ll probably coax Shannon into creating some textures for our characters.