Update 38: Competition Follow-Up and Editor Sneak Peek
Dear Backers,
We hope you have all enjoyed the Holidays and are having a blast in 2014 so far. The JAF team got a chance to recharge their batteries and we are now back to full strength. The art team is continuing to work on the first playable sector, which we are looking forward to complete very soon.
We posted a screenshot with some of the final assets in the first sector right before the Holidays and we have been getting a lot of feedback on both Facebook and our forum. Thank you for all your input! We are happy with the responses and will continue down the path we have chosen, constantly tweaking it to “perfection” based on feedback from the community and discussions within the JAF Team.
If any of you missed the screenshot on the social channels, you can find it HERE as well as see some of the feedback from other backers. It’s still Work in Progress but we’re getting closer and closer to a result that we’re all happy with.
Flag Competition
As you all know we started a flag competition before the Holidays in search of the official flag of San Hermanos. We got some pretty cool entries and it was hard to pick a winner. The winner was picked by the JAF Team and we focused on in-game readability, overall design, choice of colours and how well it depicted the History of San Hermanos.
THE WINNER IS
By Lukas from Germany
The general idea behind the flag is to tell the story of the 4 Spanish brothers Garcia, Fraco, Sal and Tori Moreno. Guided by stars, they discovered the islands of San Hermanos with their ships in 1499, though only one Garcia survived. After the Spanish withdrawal 1895 - 1909, there was a change in the color scheme into the traditional colors of the natives (green & earth).
Congratulations to Lukas and a big thanks to all who participated in the competition. It’s really fun for us to get content from the community that ends up in the game. A lot of contestants decided to make up to 7 variations of their flag and even up to 5 different flags. We thought it was a good idea to share the flags we received below, for people who sent us multiple flags we picked the ones we thought looked the best. A big THANK YOU to everyone for their effort!
We actually also received flags neatly categorized for different purposes:
Like with the Dialogue Competition we hosted earlier, there’s a possibility that we’ll use some or parts of the flags we received in the game. The team talked about City Flags and maybe Faction Flags, people will get credited if their design is used.
Mercenary Competition
We have also had a Mercenary Competition running during the Holidays and we have received a fair amount of entries ranging from serious and professional types to outright crazy and cheesy personalities. A few people missed the fact that JAF takes place pre A.I.M so their merc stories are not totally in line with the game, but they could however be slightly altered. Some people have also filled out way more info about the mercenaries than what was asked for, so we have cut some of it out in order to make a fair comparison.
It was VERY hard to choose, which is why we’re happy that it’s up to the community to choose the best one. We made our decision based on the quality of the story, how well the taglines fit the game and the personality of the mercenary. It was also important that the story didn’t feel too constructed and that the mercenary had a unique touch, some good reference pictures and descriptions also helped.
We wanted a bit of variety in the Mercenaries, so our top 5 is a mixed bunch. Click on their names to see the full information and then cast your vote by following the link beneath the list.
Top 5
Heinrich “Heini” Sackbauer
Mac “Mister” Rodgers
Elodie “Fléchette” Neuville
Mia “Wrench” Rodrigues
Patricia "Exec" Sanger-Norton
CLICK HERE TO VOTE
The voting will end on February 1st
We can’t promise that every single detail described will be in there as some may require additional programming or animations, but we will do our best to get as much in there as possible. As with the other competitions we may decide to use some of the material we get in the game and credit the people who have contributed.
Editor Sneak Peek
Since the end of our Kickstarter the editor has been a hot topic and backers wanted to know more about modding, so therefore we have decided to share a first glimpse of our internal level editor in action with the community. Our Level Designer, Filip Pilebo, gave it a quick run through, see below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CN2naxne_c
Just to clarify, the editor runs as an extension to the Unity game engine (http://unity3d.com/), therefore you need to install Unity in order to use the Jagged Alliance: Flashback level editor. The basic version of Unity is free, so basically all you need to make sure to have is a copy of the game and Unity installed to create your own sectors. You will be able to export your custom levels from the editor and play them within the game itself.
This is just the first step and we will keep adding more stuff to the editor along the way as well as new and useful tools. We will do a follow up on the progress at a later point and share more detailed information about modding possibilities.
Until next time!
The Fullcontrol JAF Team
