Hello folks, slight change as I have been beavering away coding this week, Phil (our artist, come web man, come code advisor come jack “o” all trades!) has written this weeks entry, so without further ado, here’s Phil:

“So TheSixthAxis readers, I’ve taken it upon myself to write up another entry to the journal and I can’t believe we’re on entry number 11 already! Well, what can I say? The game looks as though it’s all starting to take shape. Since our knockback of Liam leaving for personal reasons I had a sneaky feeling that maybe this game would take longer to finish, if at all. Lee’s doing a fantastic job taking on all the coding himself, I wish I understood enough of it to help him out. Coding isn’t alien to me, I’ve been a web designer for 6 years now coding in HTML, CSS, MySQL and PHP – it’s just different languages have different rules and terms. To come at it as a beginner, I think I’d probably hinder the project more than anything.

Artwork wise, well – things are a little slow. As you all know, we have lives to live – contrary to the masses “Oh you’re a geek, get a life…” and those such comments. Whilst I don’t have a full-time job, I’ve recently left uni on my own accord. This has given me a LOT of spare time. Too much if you ask me. So I’m chipping in with bits of artwork here and there, but the one that’s on my mind the most is the tile map. A simple task, but something that needs great thought.

The tile map is something that is crucial to the game, so it’s vital that I get it right. When you see the game, you’ll know what I mean. If you’re building your own arena to fight in, the last thing you want (if this is indeed your style) is to have masses of tiles/land on your screen and for the screen to just look pants. It’s gotta look the part whether your a land-freak or open-air type of pilot.

In terms of the style of the graphics – they are what I call “Pop-Vector”, a style that is almost cartoon like, but realistic. Almost like Manga but not. A hard style to describe until you actually see it. This style stems from my time working as a Graphics Designer where I was introduced to Vector programmes such as Adobe Illustrator and my personal favourite, CorelDRAW. So I guess, as this was my first experience designing artwork for a game I chose something I felt comfortable to work with – and by luck it fitted with the style of the game. Not only this, but at the time of being ‘employed’ as the artist I was into the game “Mirrors Edge”, a game which I believe to also influence my style.

So what’s next for me for the Project Blast! game? Well, first and foremost – the Tile Map Sprites. Then the weapons, and then the finishing touches. Weapons are going to be tricky, I’ve already designed for the homing missile which looks fantastic even if I do say so myself. One small problem though, when scaled to fit the game you lose all detail of the missile. Unfortunately I’ve probably put myself in a hole with choosing the style I have, things look great large – but as soon as you scale to less than 30px square you lose all definition. So, I’ll have to find a way around this to create the weapon sprites keeping with the “pop-vector” style but maybe create them in a different method to the one I’m used to.

For those desperate to see screenshots, we hear you – and very soon we’ll get them out to you! We want to make sure that we’ve got the artwork just right so that you’re not disappointed and we’re happy to release the first glimpses of the game.

Please also keep visiting our website www.adarakion.com for updates and feel free to ask away in our forums. The website’s home page will be changing slightly in the next couple of weeks to bring you regular, up-to-date, news updates on the development of Blast and other news associated with AG.

Finally, as a side note: We’ve had a few comments brought to our attention saying that we are just wasting our time because producing this game will never happen. To these people, I say thank you – you’re comments actually motivate us to prove you wrong. Watch this space, Adarakion Games is about to take off!”