Well hello! The Cavalry is happy to see you! Meet our recently tweaked (well, it would technically be recent if we were better at doing more frequent dev diaries) Cavalry.

Instead of a sword, he now has a noticeably nasty naginata.  

As we’ve been playtesting since E3 a few months ago, one of the things we realized we needed to juicify (technical term – no really) was the visual differences between the units. Jake had worked on this a bunch already, with the stylings of the armor & helmets, but we noticed that the cavalry, even with it’s horse, still occasionally got mistaken for an Infantry when players zoomed out fully.

We had a number of ideas how to amp that up, from changing the helmet outline or the crests more, but a new weapon was certainly the clearest. We debated (vigorously as we often do) what kind and whether it should go to the Infantry or the Cavalry, but Jake wanted to keep the classic image of the samurai swordsman, rightly so.

Nothing in game development is ever that easy though. The longer ranged weapon meant the Cavalry would be expected to have a longer attack range than the infantry. Beforehand the infantry actually had the longer attack range, to balance the cavalry’s power with their larger movement. So this meant we’d have to change the Infantry in order to keep its uniqueness – which was fine because we felt he didn’t have enough edge anyway.

Thankfully Ben just upgraded our physics by integrating Farseer, so in combination with that we’ve got some new ideas about how to do that – but we’ll go into that more once we’ve finished prototyping & playtesting it. Another especially nice thing about giving each unit a distinct weapon type was that it tied nicely into our design for items, something else we’ve been brewing up and hopefully will show you in the next month or two!

More excellent news, somehow we’ve managed to secure a booth at PAX in Seattle September 3, 4th and 5th!  We were a little late getting in, so we’re not on the main show floor but upstairs near the tabletop gaming area in the -late-to-the-party booth area.  REGARDLESS, you need to stop by, we’re gonna be selling our awesome can’t-keep-up-with-demand T shirts (in both men and womens sizes) and this time with GLOW IN THE DARK SKULLS.  You can’t beat that with a stick!  Come check us out, experience first hand the power of THE SHOGUN!!  Booth TCC6, WHERE THE PARTY IS.

I have the best of fantastic news.  We are MOVING UP IN THE WORLD.  Our dear friend Grampa (some people call him Paul) is coming on board as producer starting next week!  Grampa and I go waaaaaay back to my first game job at Lobotomy Software in 1996, Grampa visited me in Japan a few times, we almost died together in a giant earthquake on a small island 8 hours away from Tokyo.  We almost launched our own company while I was in LA.  LITERALLY one million adventures together, PRACTICALLY FAMILY. He has tons of experience both as a programmer and as a producer, and we can’t wait for him to help out on Skulls of the Shogun so I can do less producer stuff and more art stuff!  Cuz there is still tons of art stuff to do!! WOOOT!!