Building arcs

After some weeks of inactivity, I have finally completed the first arc (not the first episode, though) of After the Storm in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev SVN repository, comprising 7 scenarios out of planned 11; this means that a 0.3.0 release is coming soon. It was about time!

With this new arc completed, I have introduced new background story elements that could be considered controversial if any mainline purist is actually paying attention to the campaign — that's okay, I never intended IftU or any sequels to be mainlined. I still struggle to keep everything as fuzzy as possible to give a certain degree of flexibility to any content authors who decide to take what is said in IftU and AtS as “canon”. It's harder than it sounds, particularly because it must still be clear enough to allow the plot to progress; so I cannot just throw a bunch of nonsense into the campaign and say “hey, look at this, this is our vague excuse for this pathetic plotline!”.

Now that the characters have a decidedly vague excuse for the plot of the next arc, I face a problem that I knew I'd have to handle sooner or later: artwork.

I am not a good pixel artist, but I don't have any loyal slav- pixel artist that could help me either. And even if I could get one, I'm not completely sure I could describe the concepts I have in mind in plain words to tell them what unit sprites I require. There's also the spoileriffic factor; there's a reason that I removed the original (clumsy) storyboard from the SVN repository and departed from the original plans, most notably by removing a main character and introducing two new sidekicks instead. So, it's up to me to create any pixel art needed to make the campaign work; baseframes are enough for this purpose, although I still wish IftU and AtS' original units had animations.

At least I don't need to write a game engine from scratch too, thanks to Wesnoth's scripting flexibility.