The RPG4D entry my team is going to be developing will be known as Ember Skies. At this point we are in the planning stage. Ideas are jumping up, concept designs are being scribbled on paper, storyline ideas are being pieced together, and more. Once May 1st comes around we won't be delaying on the development stage.

Ember Skies is going to have three main characters who journey together through our fantasy world trying to achieve their goals. Their struggle for success will come from strategic planning and preparation. I'm introducing a battle system that will have elements of a dynamic battle and a turn based system. This hybrid battle style should bring back memories of classic turn based games, but at the same time relieve you from the constant random battles and room changing for battle scenes.

I plan on adding free roaming around the fantasy world to do side quests, training, find items, learn skills, and other stuff to keep people occupied and not only focused on the main storyline. The storyline is not nearly complete so I can't give you a summary of what to expect context wise. But I plan on implementing one that's interesting and not too predictable.

Mush will be our leading artist with his great skills in pixel art. He'll be in charge of character designs and battle systems of the game. I'm interested in having another artist on the team though to relieve him from the amount of work that he may receive in the project. If anyone wants to take part in this project and do pixel art for the environment/buildings, PM me.

We have Stevenup7002 doing some composition for us. Original piano works of art I call it. He has great talent as a musician. We'll be having a full soundtrack for the game. I hope everyone will enjoy the sound aspect of the game just as much as the graphics and gameplay. Haven't decided what we're going to do about sound effects yet, but at least we have music out of the way.

I was told we could have as many voice actors as we want so I've also been talking to people about voice acting our main characters. Certain sounds, phrases, and story lines from our main characters will have actual voices playing. I've talked to Ronnica and ShinseiOnnen about voice acting and they seem to be very interested so we might give it a shot. I'll also need a male voice actor for one of the main characters. If anyone is interested in that, PM me. I've got a few people local to my area that might be interested, but I like getting the community together with community competitions.

Lot's of things going on. I'm excited about managing a team for this competition. My main motivation and goal out of this project is to create good game for portfolio reasons and to have the experience of working with other people. The collaboration alone is all worth the time and effort that will be involved in this project. If Ember Skies is not finished during this competition, I may want to continue developing it afterwards until it is a completed project.

In the next blog regarding Ember Skies, I may have more information regarding the game itself. Right now being that we're not able to make actual development progress on the game, there's not much I can really show or say. We're just preparing for this fantasy adventure.