Recent Vespers News

Adventures with NPCs Redux: Lucca

Here we resume our efforts to bring our NPCs to life, beginning with bits and pieces of text from the IF version of Vespers and ending with a modeled, animated, and voice-acted 3D character. Last time I discussed the development of Constantin, the large hulking monk with a short temper. This time I relate the development of Lucca, who had some interesting and unique challenges of his own.

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Not Your Mother's Integrated Graphics

One of the things I noticed when I posted the request for beta testers is that a number of interested people didn't quite have the system specs I believed were needed to run the game smoothly – namely, a dedicated graphics card with a decent amount of video RAM. Systems with integrated graphics chips, at least in my mind, have not traditionally handled fairly intensive 3D games very well, hence the decision to exclude those systems, at least at the start.

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Adventures with NPCs Redux: Constantin

We continue on with our efforts to bring our NPCs to life, beginning with bits and pieces of text from the IF version of Vespers and ending with a modeled, animated, and voice-acted 3D character. Last time I discussed the development of Matteo, the oldest monk at the monastery; the second character we tackled was Constantin, who had some interesting and unique challenges of his own.

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Adventures with NPCs Redux: Matteo

Things have been moving forward lately with our NPC development, which has been a very gratifying experience. Watching a character go from a text description to a fully animated and speaking NPC model is something else. And as we move from one character to the next, incorporating each into the game, the whole project really starts to come to life. It sure as hell beats plugging away night after night on the nuances of text parsing.

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Looking Back, Looking Ahead

We've been making some good progress lately on Cecilia, the last of the six NPCs to be implemented in the game, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to bring back the old NPC introductions. This was something I started a long time ago — well before starting this blog, back when I was blogging only on GarageGames. The idea was to write an introduction to each of the characters in the game, showing their development from concept drawing to a fully modeled, animated, and voice-acted 3D NPC. I got through the first two characters, Matteo and Constantin, fairly early on. But as animation problems surfaced (and resurfaced), work slowed down. I was able to get to Lucca and Ignatius eventually, but that was about it. I did finally get Drogo implemented after a long delay, but never did get around to his introduction.

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End of March Vespers Update (or, How To Drop A Girl)

March comes, March goes. Lion, lamb, all the usual stuff.

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Long Flights Are Good For Something

One thing long flights are good for is addressing old issues that you've always meant to fix but never really got around to. So when I found myself on a three-and-a-half hour flight yesterday, I decided it was time to tackle an old parser syntax issue that has been nagging at me for some time.

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Sweet, Sweet Posters

Every once in a while you come across something that reminds you how awesome the intertubes can be. Zazzle is one of those things.

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In Backups I (Should) Trust

I never was much of a backup person until I started on the Vespers project. As things progressed, I realized how much content there was to manage, and how important it was going to be to protect it from loss. So somewhere along the way I became a backup fanatic. By my count, I believe I now have somewhere around six active backups of my data, some full backups, some partial. Let me see if I can remember them all.

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Riding The Wave

Things have been relatively quiet here on the Brew lately, particularly with respect to Vespers. I don't generally post very often, averaging about one blog per week, but even that is being stretched lately, and this is the first blog of the new year. Oftentimes silence reflects little to report from lack of progress, but in this case it's actually a Pretty Good Thing.

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