Greetings, ye devoted few! As you've probably guessed by now, 2018 has been another not-so-great year for TLT.

Back in May with the release of the latest demo, we announced our intent to make future updates more blog-oriented, and to make future demos more official in their content. That's still the plan, we just haven't had the time to actually make it happen. And yes, that's something we say a lot, but this time our lives were literally turned upside down. We had a 10 week stay with our poor-health grandmother and aunt during which we helped them with all kinds of things including cleaning and organizing decades of accumulated clutter throughout their entire house. At that time, I also received an offer to do some heavy commission work and that will continue to be an ongoing thing on top of everything else in my life for the next several months. Then there was naturally a lot to catch up on after returning home, and the next thing we knew it was the holidays, a hectic time of year as always.

Early on in 2018 I hoped people would be playing around in Gold City by the end of this year. Later, my goal shrank to having all Gold City's assets completed. By the time December hit, I just wanted to have Denise and her car done. By the time December ended, I'm happy to share that Denise's car is done!

Yeah, it's been like that. Maybe 2019 will be better. Keep believing!

We're fast approaching three months since the last demo release, and any dedicated followers of the project may have noticed that progress has been pretty minimal since then, with tweets strictly limited to #TLTuesday and often echoing much the same content as the previous week. This is because we have been very, very busy since the last demo, and with a demo just launched TLT just hasn't been a high priority lately. It also hasn't helped that some big obstacles are up next on the features list, making it all the harder to make headway--especially when you can only snag a few minutes each week.

As things have been so slow and tweets have been fairly repetitious, I thought it might be good to let everyone know of the situation and provide a little roadmap of sorts with the main features planned for the next demo.

Greetings, loyal TLT followers! Let's face it, you have to be a loyal follower to still be visiting the TLT site after this progress drought. As always we apologize for the slow pace but as we say to our volunteer staff, do what you can when you can, and that goes for Blyka and myself as well. And lately, what we can and when we can hasn't amounted to much.

Whenever I do manage to grab a bit of time, I'm putting it toward a pretty major element--Tuttle himself. I've been working on him off and on ever since we announced that we'd be changing the look to a dynamic cel-shaded style. As I've mentioned in the past, the Tuttle model was the first thing created for this project, which means my modeling ability still had a ways to go, and so did our entire vision for the game. We knew there'd eventually be changes, and now we're making them.

While Blyka has been busy grabbing what time he can to enhance TLT on the technical side, it's my job to keep things moving graphically with new models and whatnot. This post is more about the whatnot. Back when the project first started, we were pretty much newbies in the realm of 3D game creation. Some of the decisions we made at the time have needed revisiting, the latest of which is the execution of the graphical style.

Rather than keep you in suspense while I outline the ins and outs of the decision, I'm just going to say it up front.
Tuttle's Legendary Travels is shifting from hand-shaded textures to dynamic toon/cel shading!
Visually we should be able to stay pretty true to our established style with this change, so you don't have to worry about the game suddenly looking totally different. The development advantages are numerous though, so if you're interested in how this benefits the project, read on.