A few weeks ago David the artist for this project contacted me and said he would no longer be working on this project and wanted me to not use his art anymore.
After a bit of talking he agreed that I could use the art again since it would be such a big set back to the game, well once again he has asked me to remove all of his art from the project setting me back art wise to square one.
So updates have been slow because of the disappointment originally and now the setback of having to redraw everything.
The worst part of the whole ordeal is he originally contacted me when I wasn't really looking for anyone else to join the project, but I can't blame him for wanting to get paid for his work, I just didn't expect him to want to get paid for THIS work.
With it just being me on the project now I am just going to develop it and make it available to download with weekly releases and hope I get some community feedback I've been lacking.
I started working on a new concept for the game since I need to scale everything back pretty dramatically and teach myself how to draw pixel art.....
So here are my plans:
You are a citizen of a small village everyone has come down with a mysterious illness and is bed ridden in their home, you seem to be unaffected by the illness so your first task is to go out into the wilderness and collect materials to cure each NPC, each NPC you cure will open up vendor stalls, town defenses, etc.
Once the town is completely cured stage 2 of the game will start, a gateway is discovered in the town and activated by a towns member, this is like a beacon to baddies in the world, with the gateway now off it calls to them to reactivate it, you can harvest materials to help build walls, upgrade buildings and defenses leading into an almost tower defense game.
For instance, Bob is a tower archer you just finished curing him he asks you to go find a place for his archer tower, you place the footprint and he gets to building.
Now bob himself is not a lumberjack and need 100 wood to build his level 1 archer tower, so you need to go out and chop down some trees and bring him back the wood, once the wood has been placed on the footprint construction will begin, and X minutes in game bob will have a functioning archer tower and any hostiles that come near it he will shoot.
This is early concept right now and I might be reaching too far but I think this will be really fun and I can still maintain almost all of the work I’ve done so far towards the RPG, I think working by myself it would just be difficult to reach what I want in an RPG game, that and I don’t really have any cheerleaders to keep me motivated so I am just going to make whatever I want =p
You can follow my updates on lostgateways.com, but I have to replace every single piece of art so I am going to have some downtime :(
Here is a early animation of the gateway in the center of town:
Here is a early concept for some of the buildings:
After a bit of work I have replaced most of the ground and resource tiles:
David, if you are reading this, you're a real *******. You don't ******* volunteer **** that people are going to depend on, and then play "takesies-backsies" when someone waves a bigger wad in front of your face.
Yew- Don't try to make excuses or explain away what he did. It was a **** move motivated by money, rather than doing the decent thing. Seeming politeness, excuses and apologies do no change the act.
Going forward, you need to be absolutely clear with anyone that wants to "contribute", with possibility of payment or not, that said contributions are forever part of the game. Should you decide to have any helpers in the future, you'll need to find some sort of license for everything to be released under.
Gotta love these "learning experiences". Just remember, there will probably be more.
The lesson I learned is don't collaborate online :)
Hello everyone, I'm the person that did the graphics.
I regret my decision and I want to change it. It makes no sense to use the art I did for this game in another project, no matter how much I would use. The work I did for Lost Gateways was specifically thought for this game and it should be like that, always exclusive for it.
As I already told Yewbie, my move was bad. I want to give him full permission to use everything I did for him. That's the right thing to do. He's a great guy and a great coder and I don't want the project to be pushed back because of a stupid decision from my part.
Thank you, David.
Me and David have since resolved this he is a standup guy.
Congratulations for the new updates, and thanks to David it will have the last awesome graphics :)
Continue with your work yewbie, its looking great :)
I hope I can play Lost Gateways and give you some feedback ;)