Mage's Initiation - Post-Funding Update #31, The Current State of Affairs

Himalaya Studios posted a new post-funding update for Mage's Initiation with a status update on the games progress.

The Current State of Affairs

Salutations, practitioners of the arcane! It's update time once again. We hope you're giving off your 666 salutes and throwing down like a Masked Mage practicing the darkest of arts this Hallow’s Eve.

Progress on the 16:10 Conversion Update

We're making steady progress converting the dimensions of the background artwork to fit with the new 16:10 wide-screen resolution of the game. Due to the backlog of other development tasks at hand, things have been moving at a slower pace than we would have liked, but rest assured they are moving. All the GUI and menu resolution adaptations are complete, however it's a big and tedious task, having to adjust and redraw all the walkable, walk-behind, and region masks for each game background and then make additional manual scaling adjustments to ensure that the characters still appear relative to the size and scale of other objects in the background artwork. One of the bigger challenges we're tackling at the moment is applying these adjustments to the combat backgrounds. But we're over halfway done with the conversion process at the time of writing (yay!) and once complete, the benefits will more than make up for this little delay.  

Pixely Goodness

Iginor is fast becoming a boom town! We've got guards, merchants, and more mages showing their faces around this cozy burg. The Tower’s Training Hall is filling up with combat contenders, as Jeremy, our sprite animator, has been hard at work cranking out the likenesses of our terrific backers! Two major milestones were hit in the last month when all of the combat animations for our two Supreme Archmage tier backers were completed.

Swag, Glorious Swag

We don't have much news to report on the swag front -- the polyresin figures that we showed samples of in our previous update are still in production and thus haven't begun their sojourn to the States yet. Since we've had to prioritize the resolution fix work and other artwork for Mage’s Initiation, we also haven't gotten around to creating the artwork needed for the Demon's Deal playing card decks just yet… and, of course, the art books won't start production until we near the end of development and actually have all the game artwork on hand.

The same goes for the character trading cards, as we still have several dialog portraits remaining to be brought to life. However, once we wrap up all of the backer sprites, finish the resolution fixes, and complete more of the game world we'll be tackling the t-shirt and poster production next.