Woah, that's a pretty busy header-image we've got there, isn't it? It's so intense, but what does it mean? It's so bright, so vivid. Double rainbow, double rainb-....oh erm...sorry, no double rainbows here, I'm afraid.

So it's been a little over a month since we last talked. Did you enjoy our glimpse into the inner workings of our future? It was a lot of fun writing, actually. You've got your Sarsion back now though. I finished Dare to be Digital on the 15th of August, so we're all good to go now. You can read about my 10-week long adventure in the world of intense game-development here in my post-mortem blog. It's a little over 8000 words long, last I checked, so no rush. It does bring about a lot of good insight into game-development in general, so if you're interested in finding out about the ups and downs of game-development, I recommend checking that out.

So what of Whisper of recent? Well, there's a lot for us to share actually. We've all been pretty busy working in the background, whipping up sweetness.

We were recently planning to pitch Elysia to Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade publishers in the hope that they found our game compelling enough to warrant development for the XBLA marketplace. It's certainly an exciting premise, but I eventually realized we're not ready for that. We've decided to stick with Xbox Live Indie Games.

I had a few discussions with industry professionals who work with publishers, and their basic advice was "the XBLA pitching process is difficult; not difficult in that we don't think you can manage to make the game, but they will be super strict with milestones, can request or deny certain features that you want, but ultimately, they can drop your game at any time during development for no better reason than 'we just don't want this game'".

In other words, the pitching process can make or break an Indie company that isn't entirely on its feet yet. We have a great team, for sure, but I've realized that it's better we stick to the actual creation of the game, and then use the Indie Game itself as a pitch to XBLA for expansion. Previously, my concerns were that there wasn't enough room for all of our desired in-game assets, since the size limit for the final binary is just 150 MB.

This is a pretty large and extensive game we're designing. It's nothing like anything on the XBLIG Market at the moment. Not to my knowledge anyway (apart from maybe this sweet title).

Leading up to the 31st of August (the date of my flight to Seattle for PAX), I've been setting up the team's SVN. "SVN" stands for "Subversion", which is basically a fancy little tool to get everyone to throw all of their work into the one melting-pot. It's good stuff. Requires server-management and stuff, but hey, it's easily done.

So now, all of the art assets have been put in place now (along with placeholder assets for the levels we haven't yet designed and finished). All of the in-game art assets came to 90 MB. This was a worry for us, so I was forced to condense and compress our .PNG files using a handy technique called "Indexing", so they now come to just 60 MB.

Christi and I have also put in place all of the audio assets, which there are a LOT of. They were 179 MB in total, at 128 kbps, which was way too big. So we lowered the files down to 48 kbps, so they're now 40 MB. It doesn't destroy too much noticeable quality, but I guess if you listened really hard, you might notice it. Such sacrifices must be made for the sake of the 150 MB file-size limitations, sadly. It's fine, the music still sounds really sweet.

So now, all of the in-game art and audio assets for Story mode (and the menu, as well as video
files for cutscenes) come to just 100 MB. Code won't take up too much more room. Meaning that we have plenty of room to work with for expanding.

We were originally worried we couldn't fit in things like extra, bonus or longer levels, or even Multiplayer, but considering all this nice extra space we have, we'd be as well using it. Still, no promises, but things are looking really, really good on that front.

Speaking of looking really, really good...

ash55 has been working away making little gameplay preview .GIF animations with our finished character animations. I'll start off simple and we'll get more and more intense as we go on in terms of awesomeness.


Quiff knows Martial Arts!


Quiff practicing all of his moves!


Ground Pound!


Thunder Whisp Turning


Fire Droplet!


Bringing Elysian Fields to life!


The Main Menu


Showing off Sapphire Cavern in motion!


KABLAMMY! KERSPLAT!

Enjoy all of that? I thought you might. Ash has a couple more screenshots for you to check out too. Animations are cool and all, but sometimes a nice still frame is good too.


Ground-pounding the block!


Utilizing Whisp's Thunder-Mode!

Well, I don't want to overload your media-lovin' brains too much more, but I'll just give you one more picture. An insight into the SVN.


That's a lot of sweet content!

Development has really pushed into action now. The coders have begun their framework construction and it's going to be a fantastic journey to watch content roll in and actual builds getting created.

As I mentioned previously, I'm going on an adventure to Seattle on the 31st where I'll be attending PAX with a handful of other Whisper employees. I hope to see at least some of you guys there. If I don't, I'm sure you'll see us in captured moments somewhere on the Internet. I'll be in Seattle for 2 weeks, so who knows? You might even see or hear some cool content from us whilst we're over there.

Catch you later, various alligators.