I kept wanting to make an update, but decided to hold back until Quick Quest was finished, but that got delayed a little for various reasons so I thought I'd just make a non-front page post to summarise what's been going on in the games department.

JUGGERNAUT II: Uprising is the biggest project that I've been working on at the minute and man, is it close to being finished. The game is currently having audio implemented and I think there's only a couple of tracks left to go in and after that the bulk of what's left is testing and polishing. All of the core features are in, unless I'm forgetting something vital...I hope I'm not. I'll just leave a big "Coming soon!" here and leave it at that.

Ender Story: Chapter 1 is still being worked on, it's also nearly finished, but it'll likely be out after JUGGERNAUT II. I actually went through all of the stats for the characters and enemies as well as their formulae and made the effort of redoing them all so they're a lot more balanced and will, you know, actually make the battling worth doing :P The art is all finished, the music is all finished, what's really left is the all-important bank system, a few menu touch ups as well as sound effects. Then it'll be polish, test and the game will be finished.

Quick Quest should be out over the course of the next week or so. There's nothing really left to do in it, it's just a matter of messing around with the main menu as well as make sure the NG achievements work when uploaded to the site and that's that. Not certain of an exact date, but it really shouldn't take long.

Mega Galaxy Force hasn't progressed too much, but what is being worked on will add a lot more challenge to the game and once that's done, it'll be pretty smooth sailing until the boss of the game is designed. I'm pretty excited about this one because I love me some Sentai and Rangers and it's largely a big tribute to them. Even in it's current state, I get a nice kick out of playing all of the maps in the game so far so like I said, very excited for this one.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realise I'm really excited for all of these to be released. I'm working on another game project at the minute, but there's not much point talking about it until there's more work done on it. I've only recently found a programmer and once there's a bit more of a demo, I'll have plenty of screens to post. I also just realised that this is my first post of 2014 which is strange, didn't notice it'd been quite that long. 2014, definitely a big year ahead with all of these games (hopefully) coming out at some stage.

Wow, first time using the new comment system and it's very unlike what I'm used to. I have to say though, it's a definite positive change though! Time for my usual month...no, weekl...semi-regular update about my games, movies, art, etc.

Prepare for a long post complete with screenshots from each of the projects. If you want to pretend you read it, skip to my summary paragraph at the bottom and leave a comment about that instead.

JUGGERNAUT II: Uprising

I'm pretty happy to say that we're getting ever more close to being finished. I keep overestimating when we might release the game, but rest assured, it'll not be too much longer. We're polishing off enemy techniques in battles as well as making sure all of the cut scenes are done and the menus are complete. Once we've finished that we only have a few things left to tackle: saving/loading, balancing battles, crafting and adding in the voice acting. After that we'll largely be done, we'll only have a few more of the minor things to add and polish up before starting our proper testing phase.

Ender Story: Chapter 1

After slowing down considerably for a while, we're back working on some of the final things that we need to finish the game. The cut scenes are finished, battling is finished, etc. All we need to do is add the quest menu, abilities menu, proper saving/loading systems, an item bank for transferring items to later chapters and...I think that's it actually? After that we'll be balancing combat and then doing the testing and polishing before beginning the sponsor hunt.

This is the game that's been in development for the longest time, we're probably hitting about nine months now. It really has taken longer than I thought it would, but as it's the first game in the series and the engine will be used for each of the subsequent games, I'm not too bothered. As long as the game is good and good free, I'm happy.

Quick Quest

Quick Quest is basically finished now. We uploaded the game to FGL and got feedback from one of the moderators there, all we need to do now is polish the game up a bit and we'll be good to start the sponsor hunt for real. It shouldn't take us much longer than a week, to get the game done. We'd love to have it finished for Christmas though and hopefully a release date of late January, early February.

It was always meant to be a quick, fun game and I think it is. It's not taken us all that long to make and it's been pretty smooth sailing throughout. It's also the first game that I've made that Matt hasn't done the music for and it was interesting to see what a different musician could come up with for it. We've been lucky to work with the very talented LloydeSorrow who did an amazing job in such a short time.

Mega Galaxy Force

The game was moving along incredibly quickly, but unfortunately, it's now going to be a bit slower due to unavoidable work commitments. We're still going to be making the game and I've got almost half of the levels finished as well as the ideas behind the three different modes finished. All I really have left to do from an art perspective is the second half of the levels, some introductory menu work as well as most of the sprites for the final boss.

Once there's some free time, we'll get the game largely finished. Hopefully Newgrounds will have Unity support by the time that the game is released otherwise we might not see a release on this site. I know that Unity support was in the plans, but I haven't really heard much about it recently so we'll have to see.

Mega Galaxy Force - Episode 1

"But VoidForce, you've already talked about Mega Galaxy Force!"

No, no, I'm talking about the animation series now. To go along with the game, I'm making an animation series following the events leading up to the game with the game being the culmination of the story. It allows the characters to have some crazy adventures not solely set on the spaceship of their main enemy as well as allowing a few supporting characters to have a bit more characterisation.

There are eight roles to fill in the first episode (of an intended three) and I've recorded the voices for four of them (Galactic Blue, the Space Goons, Neogeoleonoid and Admiral Varack). I'd really like to get involved in more voice work so I decided to go ahead and record them. I think they turned out pretty good, but hopefully I'm not the only one who thinks so. I'm currently casting the other four roles (Galactic Red, Green, Yellow and Pink) and casting is ending in a few days. A lot of amazing talents have auditioned so far and I could easily fill the roles already so I can't wait to see how this all turns out.

Project release date for the first episode? As much as I love giving these, they're always completely wrong, so I'll say that I hope the first episode is out within three months.

So now that I've sufficiently bored everybody to death with project news, I'll probably not give another big update for another month or so. I'll keep most of my small updates to my Twitter page which should be linked on my main Newgrounds page. If I've got anything else that's bigger than a Twitter post or two, I'll probably post it here, but not front page it.

Anyway, the summary paragrpah that I promised up there. JUGGERNAUT II is nearly finished, Ender Story: Chapter 1 is nearly finished, Quick Quest pretty much IS finished, Mega Galaxy Force (game) is about half finished and will be a bit delayed and Mega Galaxy Force (series) is almost finished casting.

Wow, this really was a long post.

Edit: Oh yeah, the cat part of the title. I drew my cat and my sister's cats as ninja cyborgs, check them out in my art section!

I started working on something a couple of hours ago. It's an idea for a new RPG using actual 2D character models rather than pixelated sprites. I've included a picture of the "mannequin" models that I've made down below. The one on the left is a humanoid model and the ones on the right are goblin models. They currently only have their idle animations which are really just them bouncing up and down a little on their feet. It's really just to give them a bit of motion rather than having them standing completely still.

I feel that if I go ahead and make an actual game out of this and I'm happy with it, it could maybe be the style that I utilise in the future. I love sprites, but trying to make animations out of them isn't fun at all, particularly considering that I make them in Paint, haha. I'm currently writing battle mechanics as I'd like this game to be a lot more focused on battle strategy than any of the other RPG games I've made or am still making.

When I say mechanics, I'm more coming up with concepts and spells rather than actual stats just yet. I'll keep to the same basic elements that I usually use for the magic system only have it seem a little more divided. There'll be Quadrant Magic (Fire, Water, Wind, Earth), there'll be Balance Magic (Light, Shadow), there'll be Negative Magic (Void) and I'm going to be including Status Magic as it's own thing rather than tying it into the other elements.

I'll probably work off a class system too this time around. The characters won't have real classes exactly, but their starting builds and special abilities will push them in that direction. So a warrior may have a special ability called "Duel", a monk may have a special ability called "Combo" or something in that direction. Magic layout will be largely customisable, it'll be dependent on the players learning the magic from certain items and spending experience points to use it. This means I'll probably abandon the traditional levelling up system to give the experience points more of a cash-in sort of feel.

As far as characters and settings go, I'm not entirely certain yet. At the minute, the setting will be one of the planets in the Eleverse which is in the same universe as two of my current games, Ender Story and Quick Quest, that I'm working on. Rather than make it a game that's instalment based like the JUGGERNAUT series and Ender Story series, I'd want to make it one complete game. It's really far too early to be thinking about sequels properly, but it's always something that'll be on my mind as I work on it. Potential sequels would follow a different cast of characters on a different planet in the Eleverse so it keeps the stories very separate.

Now for the bit that I love the most and hate just as much sometimes...writing the story. The way I usually do things is come up with a character or group of characters and then write the story based around the characters. This time I want to do things a little differently and write the basic idea for the story, then write the characters, then flesh the rest of the story out around them. That way I can hopefully avoid my usual route of rewriting the ending of the game (or series in most cases) twenty different times!

Remember that last post I made about always taking on too much? IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN!

Good God, do I have a busy end-of-year. I've got a lot of projects, both games and otherwise, to finish or at least make good progress on. I keep saying that I think I've taken on too much and then as soon as I find a free second, I take on something else as well. At the same time, it keeps me from being bored, haha.

On the games front, I've got JUGGERNAUT II, Ender Story, Quick Quest and Mega Galaxy Force that I've got measurable progress on. The first three are nearly finished, all past the 75% mark (not including testing and sponsorship hunting) I'd say which is a definite positive. Quick Quest will probably be the first of those to come out as it's easily the smallest of the three. Mega Galaxy Force has a great working prototype at the ready. All of the basic platforming mechanics are there, jumping, attacking, climbing and being able to go to new maps. Enemies are the task we're working on at the minute and it'll add a whole new layer to the early maps that we've got ready.

I've also started work on a couple of animations that I'd like to get finished within my self-imposed deadline of 30 days from now. One is actually based on Mega Galaxy Force, it's a bit of a silly comedy sort of thing parodying Super Sentai/Power Rangers to match the game. The game itself is dialogue light so it doesn't give off a lot in the way of seriousness or comedy, but the animation is intentionally ridiculous. The other animation is a Pokemon parody regarding remakes of older games. It's poking fun at how, despite being a silent protagonist, the remake characters just feel so different from the early ones.

The final major thing that I'm working on with my friend/house mate is a game review YouTube channel. It's something that we've talked about doing for the past four months or so and we've finally gotten serious about it. We've written the first review, captured the footage that we need and are going to work on the final script tomorrow before sitting down and recording our parts. The voice overs for the footage will need to wait until next week when my new microphone arrives. We aim to build up a backlog of about four reviews so we can release them over a period of time while working on future ones. It'll give us a bit of time to get used to doing everything involved in it.

That about covers it all! Quite a big list of things to work on and hopefully finish (mostly) by the end of the year. Here's a screenshot from Mega Galaxy Force to round off the post.

So, I've had a lot going on in the past few weeks. Plenty of game progress has been made, even a few new projects have got started. Prepare for a long read!

Old Projects

JUGGERNAUT II: Uprising
Jeez, I don't even know where to start. We started the first game around this time last year and it took until June to be released. This time around we started at the very end of August and we've flown through it. We're working on battles at the minute, but everything is going great. We have nearly half of the cut scenes done, but the one we stopped at ends in a battle so we thought it best to do those and get battles finished fully.

Ender Story: Chapter 1
We have loads of new equipment put into the game to allow for more customisation. I've also finished character portraits for the three party members and two of the named NPCs. There are three more portraits that I need to do and will hopefully get finished within the next couple of days. We've also been discussing how to transfer the collected items across. We think it'll probably be done through the save system, we'll have it linked into the in-game item bank system so that when you complete the game you can store your gear in the bank and save it for the next game.

Earth Reborn
Guh, progress is being made again, but it's getting hard to really care any more.

New Projects

Quick Quest
This is a runner game where the player is on a quest to get the Book of Ages. Why's he on this quest? Not a clue. What's he going to do with the book? Not important. What is important is that you must get him there. Your goal in the game is to run through the plains, a forest, a cemetery, a cave, a tomb, a canyon, a volcano and then the temple where the book is kept. Make sure to avoid the enemies and the rough terrain along the way or you'll just end up getting injured and eventually have to give up your quest.

Mega Galaxy Force
This is a game that I designed most of the current artwork for a good eight months ago. It's a platform game where the player plays as the members of the Mega Galaxy Force (think Super Sentai/Power Rangers) and they're on a mission to stop Admiral Vrak as he tries to conquer the known galaxies. The team stowaway in the cargo bay of his spaceship and have to navigate their way to the top while defeating or avoiding the enemies that risk their mission. There's going to be three main levels, the cargo bay, the ship corridors and the administration area. The game will culminate in a battle against the Admiral himself. It's a game that I've wanted to make for ages, but struggled to find a programmer for. I've luckily managed to find one and we've already got a prototype of the first section of the first level made so we can see how the game will work mechanically.

Here's a screenshot of Mega Galaxy Force to round up this post! Keep in mind that the background hasn't been put in place yet so it will look more impressive once that's in!

So since just before this time last night I started work on a new project. It's a "choose-your-own-adventure" sort of story and it was mainly just a way to pass a bit of time. It was partly inspired by The Sagittarian series here on Newgrounds and Fallout as well. I've written just over 80 scenes, 3 main endings and a game over ending which took me about six hours last night. I started drawing the scenes today and I've been going for about five hours and I've done the first 50 scenes.

The progress for the game is going really quickly. I'm going to try coding it myself...which will probably end badly...we'll see. I'd like to have it released some time this week. I don't know if it's worth trying to get it sponsored as it's largely just a writing and art experiment for me. I'm not great at digital art by any stretch of the imagination so I'm trying to use this to improve a bit.

Onto other news!

JUGGERNAUT II: Uprising has been making strides forwards. We've made a bit of a start on the battle stuff, the overworld is done, a good bit of the menu stuff is in, we're about to start cut scenes, we've got a couple of music tracks finished and about half of the voice acting is now complete. We're definitely on track to have the game released before the end of the year which is something I'm going to pull out all of the stops to do.

Earth Reborn is still at the "I don't have a clue what's going on!" stage and it's not particularly fun. What bothers me is that it was meant to be started and then finished within six weeks. We're now like fifteen weeks in and that kind of sucks. It's kind of put me off making it into a series, that's now sort of dependent on how successful it ends up being. I'll try and get a demo of the game at the start of the week and make the sponsor pitch video, it's been something that I've been wanting to do for the past three weeks as it at keeps me involved.

On a much more positive note, Ender Story is about to have it's cut scenes done. I've gotten them written and the character movements all scripted out so it's just a matter of putting them into the game. After that we need to do shops, saving/loading and then do a few minor things with the menus. Now that we've moved away from the battle system, the game seems so much more complete. It's probably the project I'm most eager to get released soon as it's something I've put so much time into and I think as the games come out, the story will really develop well.

Ender Story isn't like the JUGGERNAUT series in that I don't have everything planned out in great details, I've more given myself a general guideline for each game consisting of a small paragraph. That leaves a lot more room to make it a much more entertaining writing experience as JUGGERNAUT III has already been scripted, whereas Ender Story will have a degree of making it up as I go along. That doesn't mean it'll be a bunch of nonsense though, there's a lot of character exploration I intend to do and a lot more emphasis on doing side quests than there is in JUGGERNAUT.

Anyway, here's another screenshot from Ender Story. That's a lot of blank party member slots, right? Yeah, expect those all to be used up by the end of the final game.

Progress with JUGGERNAUT II: Uprising is going incredibly well, a lot quicker than it did with the first game. We've actually got a current demo done with the overworld and world map implemented. It's a bit different than last time in that we've went with a pseudo-realistic map style and all you have to do is click on the locations to go there. As the games progress, I'd like to try and bring in a few non-pixelated things like character portraits too. I was initially intending to that this time around, but until my art gets to a level I'm happy with I think it's best to hold off.

As I've mentioned before, we're bringing voice actors into the mix and we've actually got a cast for all of the main characters and main villains of the game. I'm pretty psyched to see how it all turns out once everything is recorded and implemented. I've finished the script and we've been messing with battle dialogue ideas. The battle dialogue is pretty cheesy, not gonna lie, but it's going to be entertaining at the very least. The people we've brought in are very talented and I'm eager to really get started working with them all.

If you want to be kept up to date with our progress as we go, follow me on here, Twitter or deviantART.

On a similar, but different note, Ender Story is almost finished. The version I've seen most recently (at the weekend) is outstanding. We've not got an awful lot left to do and the stuff that we DO have left to do is mostly straightforward. The current list of things we need to add is: Battle Rewards, Summon Levelling, Quest Menu, Party Member Switching, Cut Scenes, Saving and Loading.

A lot of that stuff can be tackled in quick succession and then it's the ever-classic sponsor hunt that we have to go through. As soon as we have the first two in I'm probably going to start grabbing footage for a trailer. I'll be sure to post it on here when it's done so everybody can see what it's like, hopefully it'll be impressive. I'm certainly happy with it!

My other game that should be finished, Earth Reborn, seems to have stopped momentarily. I haven't heard from the programmer in three weeks, but all the art, music and sound effects are definitely done as both me and Matt saw to those. I'd like it to be out in early October, but that's dependent on when I see the completed game. George, the programmer, is good though, so I have faith that he'll come through soon and we'll be able to show it off a bit.

Here's a picture from Ender Story for your viewing pleasure:

I post about once a week on my deviantART page and it feels like I've neglected Newgrounds as far as updates go. I have a fair few projects in the works at the minute and just want to give a bit of informaiton about them and their progress. Bear with me, there's a few at various stages in development so this may be quite long

JUGGERNAUT II: Uprising
This is the sequel to a game that me, MSGHero and Mattlaaa released back in June. It's early days as far as progress goes, but I've got a large amount of the art done. Until recently I would have said about 90% of the art, but I'll lower that to around 75% as we've decided to redesign the menu system in its entirety. There'll be many improvements in this game over the last, some are listed below. Note that this is just off the top of my head at the minute, there are more than this:
- More party members
- More weapons and accessories
- More locations
- Mouse controls
- New menu system
- Overhaulted battles
- Voice acting

I've received voice auditions from about 40 people at this stage, most of whom auditioned for multiple characters. There's certainly a large talent pool to choose from. As I've said, we're not all that far into working on the project, but I'm hoping for a release before the end of the year.

Ender Story
This is an RPG that I'm working on with adamkingdom and Mattlaaa. It's quite different from JUGGERNAUT both graphically and in terms of gameplay, but it'll still feature a turn-based battle system. We've been working on it for a few months and we're close to finishing off the battle system. I'm hoping that we'll have the majority of the game wrapped up in the next six to eight weeks and a release maybe a month or so after that.

It's intended to be the first in a long series of around seven games, but that's subject to change. It'll be relatively story-focused, but I'd also like there to be a bit more of an open world feel to the series after the first chapter. Exploration is something that I've always enjoyed in games and would like to provide that in this series.

Earth Reborn
This is a bit deviation from my typical style. Earth Reborn is an action-adventure similar in style to 2D Zelda games. The idea is that you're living in a post-apocalyptic future and your subterranean home has been invaded by mutants and you've decided to try your chances in the wastelands above. Your aim is to escape by whatever means necessary. The game provides a few choices in dialogue with NPCs which will impact the ending based on your morality. Let's say there's a man wanting to know if the path you came from is clear, you could lie and send him to his death or be honest and tell him he's safer to stay put. The former would give you negative morality points and the latter would give your positive points.

This game is quite far along the production line and we should be wrapping it up in the next couple of weeks. We'll probably spend a month or so looking for a sponsor and then get the game out. It was intended to be a change of pace from the longer projects I like getting sunk into and it's been good fun doing so.

Other Projects
Those were the projects that have had some manner of collaboration already and are likely to come out in the relatively near future. I have a number of other projects that are currently all solo as I've just been working away at artwork, story, mechanical ideas, etc. One of these is a platformer which I've been messing around with for months and is making little progress. I've also started work on a monster catching game similar to early Pokemon games and Digimon World for the Playstation. My most recent undertaking is an isometric tactical RPG game which is a nice graphical experiment for me, the sprites are a lot more detailed than anything I've done before.

Hopefully somebody has found something of interest in here, if anybody wants more information or is looking to collaborate whether that be a programmer, musician, voice actor, or whoever, just drop me a PM or a comment below.

So Newgrounds, how've you been?

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally released JUGGERNAUT: Awakening. It's being released here on Newgrounds and will be making it's way around other gaming websites over the next while. A lot of work has went into it from myself, MSGHero and Mattlaaa so it's nice to finally be able to say we've got it out.

I first started working on this project back in October doing various bits and pieces before getting anybody else involved and it's strange seeing how much it's evolved since those initial concepts. Hopefully it goes down pretty well as it's intended as the first in the series. As far as the next one goes, I haven't a clue when it'll be out. I've finished almost all of the artwork including characters, maps, enemies, etc. so it shouldn't take too long to make when we decide to start putting it together properly.

I've got a number of other projects in the works at the moment, two of which I'm working at pretty hard. One is another RPG (unrelated to the JUGGERNAUT series) called Ender Story which is maybe about 75% finished, I'm working on it with both Mattlaaa and AdamKingdom as the musician and programmer, respectively. The other one is a smaller and less ambitious game called Earth Reborn, it's a post-apocalyptic 2D Zelda-style action-adventure with a few RPG elements. I haven't got a coder for Earth Reborn yet so most of the information about that is being kept under wraps until I find one.

Anyway, hopefully everybody who sees this gives JUGGERNAUT: Awakening a go. If you want to check out other stuff I'm working on, visit my Twitter or deviantART pages which you can find here:
VoidForce Twitter
VoidForce deviantART

Until next time!

My first game is almost here, it's an RPG called "JUGGERNAUT: Awakening" and it's been in the works for almost six months. I'm the writer and artist for the project and I've been fortunate enough to find a very skilled coder and a very talented musician to work with.

I would say the game is over 90% done, there's not a lot left to do. The main features left are saving, loading and four cut scenes. I'll probably need to make a few adjustments to a couple enemy stats to keep the battles balanced, but for the majority of enemies it isn't a problem. After the main features are put in place, it'll be time to get the game into testing which will take maybe a week. The game isn't particularly buggy so that's probably an overestimation but I don't want to set a release date and not be able to follow through. I will say that I'm pretty confident that it'll be released in March at some point.

In other news, I've been looking into starting another series and have been trying to find a coder to work with. I'll once again be writing and doing the art for this project. You know how I love my RPGs so it'll be another RPG project but I don't want to stick to the same formula as the JUGGERNAUT series so there'll be a fair number of differences. I've got all of the characters designed, all of the maps designed, all of the items designed and a couple of the menus designed so progress is good. I still need to do a few more menus, enemies and battle backgrounds. Some of my "completed" sections might need a few more additions as the game progresses of course.

So yeah, I'm looking for a coder to work with for this. If any happen to read this and have AS3 experience, drop me a message and I'll get back to you.

Until next time!

EDIT - Coder found, psyched!