<<<<< DAY 16 >>>>>

One dilemma going into this game is what rating to shoot for. On the one hand, the more general the rating, the wider the audience. On the other hand, the nature of horror games makes it almost impossible to attain anything less than a Teen rating. So here's the general direction the game's gonna take:

1. It will have at least a Teen,  maybe even close to Mature (Rated R), rating. I believe this is still within the contest rules.
2. The game will have some gore, but not "piles of bloody mashed body parts everywhere" overkill. Mainly because I'm not a big gore fan. XD
3. Strong language such as F*** and S*** will be used at times in the game. We won't sprinkle every sentence with them, but it really would break immersion if our characters go "Oopsie daisy!" during intense moments.

Of course, we're aiming to make this as good as a pixel horror game can be. Which means it has to be somewhat scary at the very least. Still, there's only so much you can do with pixel graphics, but just to be on the safe side, I'm still including a fair warning before the game begins:

Players should know before they start that this is designed to be a horror game and may not be suitable for everyone.

However, if uh, we should like...win, and it becomes necessary to make the game suitable for a wider audience, we are definitely open to toning down the game to PG-13 levels (cough...talking to you judges...cough....XD).

<<<<< DAY 17 >>>>>

I remember the first year I did IGMC I actually spent money on buying advertising. At the time I thought paying for banner space would help us attract more players. It did I suppose, but the effect wasn't as spectacular as I thought it would be. I think marketing and advertising isn't that effective unless one goes past a certain spending tipping point, which is probably beyond the means of most indie developers.

Since our budget is limited, instead of spending it on advertising, this year we're gonna put it into content instead. One of those things is cover art. I've always loved those games with great cover art, so I wanted one for our entry this year too. Since I can't draw worth a damn, and Linhtendo already has much on her plate, we hired the very talented Michael Galefire to draw us this wonderful cover art for Chosen:

Isn't that absolutely stunning? He painted it based on some basic concepts we provided. You can see our hero Gabriel in that cube. Our team really likes it, and I think it's fits the mood of our game very well. Thanks Michael! Phenomenal artist! I highly recommend him.

<<<<< DAY 18 >>>>>

I've always made RPG Maker games controlled by the keyboard. However, Chosen has a more adventure game mechanic that seems to work better with a mouse driven interface.

So while you can still play the game with a keyboard, we're going to design the game as if the player has no keyboard.

Not much more to report today. Everyone hard at work. ^^

<<<<< DAY 20 >>>>>

So we've been hard at work on the game over the weekend. Putting everything together. Here's a quick progress update:

• Miss Nile is done all the maps! Yay! Now I got to event all of them. Nooooooooooooo!!!
• CuckooOrange ran into a problem with the transparency. Now things don't disappear. Oh no! We gotta solve this soon!
• Linhtendo finished more sketches, will begin coloring. Can't wait to see 'em!

The game's about 50% done, but still lots of work to do. Anyways, here's a screenshot of the game:

Ok. I'm just kidding. :p Well, it IS an actual screenshot of the game, but probably not the most glamorous one. Being a horror game, there will be times when our protagonist has to traverse through dark places. Darkness is an enemy. Still, just looking at darkness probably isn't very interesting, so here's one with lights on:

The Pop Horror set works quite well. And the lighting script we're using is Terrax Lighting, which is pretty awesome!