It's been just over a month since Dahku announced its return to the game scene. Reception was predictably underwhelming--we hadn't exactly attracted a large following in the past, and we weren't quite ready to talk about the future. As it happens, we still aren't ready for any sort of official reveal on our new project, but we figured it couldn't hurt to drop some early details and let our few devoted followers know how things are going.

Toby shared the above screenshot on May 6th, a very early look at his side of things. His testing environment hasn't changed much in the past month, but for the programmer it's all about what's under the hood. He's more than doubled the number of lines of core code at work since then, and all of it's been fine-tuned for efficiency and performance along the way. In short, all major motion and collision functionality is in place and running super smoothly.

Our main character model is very near to complete, and hopefully she'll be animated and ready to insert into the engine before long. But my time hasn't been solely devoted to one character. Among other things, I've been building an environment that will ultimately be our intro stage. There's still much to be done, as the screenshot below shows, but there's been a lot of texture and shader work involved as each piece of the stage is added and we feel our way toward perfecting the desired aesthetic.

As you may have gathered, we're developing a 2.5D platformer. And, that's about as specific as we want to get right now. We're making something big, and don't want to unveil it prematurely. As for how big, let's just say that even at this early point, the total hours poured into the project will soon match the time we put into Chubbins, previously our biggest title. And we're not alone; we've been getting advanced opinions from select individuals who are prominent in the online communities that represent our target audience, and just today we signed a contract with an awesome composer who will be providing our soundtrack! Stay tuned, the future is looking bright!