Greetings from Stark Knight Studios!

I know this is a bit sloppy, and I can guarantee to be much cleaner in my future updates. The progress updates will be every Sunday, so keep an eye or two peeled. Constructive comments are very welcome!

Feel free to follow the progress on my blogspot/portfolio: http://rileysconceptdesign.blogspot.com/2012/05/unnamed-rpg-week-1-progress.html

First and foremost, we pieced together a player character from the initial mockup. I REALLY like the visual style of this character and would love to play this out entirely. Also, I whipped together some visual/conceptual test images of other characters in the game. This cemented my love for the art style. I'm ready to start bolting out new character designs.

This is the first stages of the level editor to be used for level creation. While it only has the basics at this point, it's extremely flexible and can already save and load protected level files. Triggers placed throughout the level will progress the story line of the game and introduce the player to new settings, characters, and villains.

This is the base for the tree generation and animation for the game. Each tree is spawned at the start of the level and will dynamically animate with the wind as it changes. I'm excited to bring you some video footage of these in action soon. Still frames simply do not do these lively trees justice. The topmost trees are at half scale.

This is the first look at the day-night system to be used in the game. I know the stars do NOT match the rest of the art; rest assured the texture is simply placeholder. The screenshots might be a bit confusing: the bottom half is not seen by the player.

Last, but certainly not least, is the first test of the bloom engine running in the tree engine for testing purposes. I was worried about using post-processing effects given Game Maker's limited rendering abilities, but this particular method is VERY efficient - noticed no framerate loss on my dual core 2.1 laptop with a joke of a graphics card. Hopefully this will still be viable after the engines are pulled together for the game. Fingers crossed!