Essenceborn has been in development now for 1 year with a single programmer and no artists (so far!). I made a few videos along the way on a variety of topics - both showing progress and going over some design decisions. In this first dev log I am posting links to these videos in chronological order.

Two months in, there was a server (running on a local machine) and a basic client rendering as an svg in the web browser.

Shortly followed by a post about scheduling movement and movement animations from many quick commands:

Three months in and a post on the design of the mechanics of cliff-diving (walking or falling into chasms):

5 months in and a look at how the stealth mechanics interact with condition negations:

and a look at how keywords are used to place restrictions during battlegroup construction:

Clearly the 5 month point is where a lot of work on the core engine went on. Further design of mechanics from that stage:

At 6 months, the major mechanics were pretty settled. In the following post there are some points about an awkward set of interactions required to make the Latch On ability work in an intuitive way.

Almost a whole month was spent moving to a basic WebGL view. At the 7 month point this didn't look much nicer than the initial test map renderer, but was much more performant (using the GPU, smooth scrolling, yay!)

Which brings us to now. The last 3 months have been all about ironing out small bugs. Fixing descriptions for abilities. Updating some terrain sprites (notably water and lava), and adding server-side features like tracking game results, player rankings, etc.

The primary focus now is on the unit sprites. In later posts I hope to start discussing how I'm setting up a factory line for getting animated sprites with front and back views. There are over 60 champions that need sprites in the game already, and another 300 are planned! This is *the* big job in developing Essenceborn.