Early concept art and announcements

It's time for some announcements! First let me get the ones I am not going to get into detail out of the way.

DwarvesH (under a new name) should be coming to IndieDB soon. I've done some initial research and this seems to be a fine platform to get some exposure. So I can secure a huge fan base that I can continue to endlessly tease with release dates that keep getting pushed back. OK, I won't do that, I am just making fun of the release date dynamics of such ambitious yet very small team projects. So if you have some quick and dirty gossip related to IndieDB that I am not aware off, things like "they charge bandwidth after 1GiB of total traffic", "there is a strong but silent anti-dwarf movement on that site" or "imma let you finish, but BringieGM is the best indie site of all time!" then let me know now before it is not too late! :) I'll keep this blog as the main communication channel, where I go into my usual detail. I'll write more on this topic when the game is up on IndieDB. Of all time!

The second announcement is that soon I am going to be accepting pure optional donations. Pretty run of the mill process, so you should be familiar with it form other games or open source projects. I'll do a lengthy post about donations, the motivation for them, what are the conditions and future business model when the time is right.

But what I am going to talk about more about is my new collaborator:  Lucifielle. Say "Hi Lucifielle!"! Or more precisely, what we are going to be collaborating on. As you may know, my previous attempt at getting some graphics into DwarvesH did not go over that smoothly. I started with placeholder art taken from other compatible sources, like Stonesense, and had absolutely zero luck finding a local talented artist interested in working with me. That is very strange, seeing that I am virtually surrounded by people in the IT and design domain. And I also abide to highest dwarven hygiene standards. I had a short and fruitful collaboration with someone, but that said person decided to ignore all my attempts at communication after a point without explanation. Strange again, since I also abide to the highest dwarven personality and pleasant company standards. Right now I am collaborating with another person, but it is not working out too well.

So third time's a charm! Right? Let's hope so. If not, there is always number four. Like in that movie.

With the help of Lucifielle I'll try to give a distinctive look to the game, starting with the dwarves. Right now we are at a very early stage of creating concept art. I call this exploratory concept art. The general look, shape, size, face features, clothing style and everything else is not set into stone yet, and we are trying a lot of things. First, body shape. Here are one of the first early sketches:

This are really "top of the head" sketches. Soon the look will become more stable, but the first experiments are going to based on the these two bodies:

Dwarven women with beards and chest hair FTW!