Level design in full swing

While Ed fights the hardware, I was able to complete two more level layouts for the introductory part of our game (teaching about controls, interaction, puzzle solving etc).
One basic puzzle might look like this:

Easy stuff, but my pholosophy is, the easier You can drag the player into the game, the better, and I am all for seamless transition while providing actual gameplay.

"Press A to jump" for no purpose has...no purpose, so we put the learning phase right there into the gameplay from second one.

At the same time, Ed came up with a brilliant idea how to trace the layouts in our "DyEd" editor, to create them quickly and easily and be able to make changes without pain.

Fun times ahead.

Art development: Two books

Since I buy educational books from time to time, here are two I recently purchased, and my short, biased opinion on them:

Game Art Complete

This one is very superficial when it comes to zBrush, it covers barely the basics . The modeling parts for 3DS Max and Maya, as well as the texturing parts with Photoshop are decent.The game model created is very good, and the process involved is explained thoroughly. Included are anatomical explainations, photography, retouching, modelling, concept art, character design.

Realistic Game Characters

This one is a brilliant zBrush learning ressource.Explained are the brushes, the modelling process, in depth anatomical details, how to create a model for a next gen game engine and how to create textures. Very well explained, includes a DVD and is from a Pixologic insider.Very good !

Ed: Yes its me again ;). This time I have completed the packing system and its fast. In comparison the old system I was using took twenty seconds to pack five images which to me was incredibly inefficient so I rewrote the entire section of the code now for five images it took twelve milliseconds (yes twelve milliseconds) so we now have a MAJOR speed increase. I will now add this to the reservoir system of the editor that will allow us to create anything imaginable and use the editor with much more ease.