Core of Innocence is a good old fashioned side-scrolling platformer game, playing in a similar vein to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid. It has been in production for almost five years and gets closer every day. Once complete, the game will be FREE for all to play, with the possibility of expanding later down the road. All the in-game artwork is original and hand drawn/sprited by myself (Don James), the music is being composed by Aaron Boyer, with an animated intro sequence to the game created by Samuel Petersen.

Back in July of 2010, I attended Click Convention 2010 that was held in London, England in which I showcased the project in front of the Clickteam community as well as the developers behind MMF2 and other Clickteam software titles.

Pudding Hat Games was founded December 2008, as an indie game and application design group. We are currently getting closer the completion of our flagship title Core of Innocence and have a second game in the works, with more planned down the line, looking into mobile game development and other various multi-player platforms.

The year is 2528.The story follows a young woman named Lila - who has recently graduated college in archaeological studies and is summoned by her grandfather to assist him in his research at an underground mining facility, where a new rare mineral has been discovered. Things take a turn for the worse as an ancient evil from a distant world reveals itself and rekindles the fire that fueled a bloody war that happened over 2000 years ago, this time threatening to bring the fight to Earth. Lila has an encounter with the antagonist who attacks her with his new-found power, but the attack causes her unworldly blood to fuse with her 'Variable Outfit System' implant, giving her superhuman ability. It was at this moment she decides to take a stand and protect her world at any cost.

Currently, there are over 250 pieces of equipment to wear, 49 weapons to strike down your foes, 18 spells at your fingertips, along with several other key items to obtain that increase mobility and grant access to different areas. There are eight areas in Core of Innocence each with its own “theme”, bosses, enemies, items, and secret areas. There will also be 18 side-quests in the game to further expand upon the story and to reward the player with equipment and items upon completion!

The entire game world is all but finished. I have 40 of the proposed 60 unique enemy sprites completed, and they are currently in testing by my alpha testing crew. My current task is to finish up the remaining 20 enemies (give or take) and get the bosses for the game completed, and then get everything plugged in and tested. After I am happy after that round of testing, I'm going to give the game a once over and add in various doodads and some ambient effects to spruce up the levels a bit and to bring more life to the game world.

Our game intro animator Sam is just about done with the intro movie for the game. He is now applying the final edits to sync the movie up with the song that Aaron composed for the intro, and then we should be able to wrap that up.

Our test group is currently testing the current completed enemies for difficulty balancing and general bug finding and so far bug reports have been very minimal one-off stuff, not to mention easily fixable! 

I hope to complete the game by end of this year - barring any unforeseen delays and what have you. I've been workin' on this long enough! Time for the final stretch in getting it finished! The current state of the game is turning out awesome and I've been making great progress overall but there are still some areas in which we are hitting some slowdown which is where Kickstarter comes in.

Up to now I've been funding everything out of pocket and sadly the needs for production are starting to get bigger than what I can support. I have come to Kickstarter because I love creating games, and what better place to find people who are just as passionate about their dreams and hobbies as I am, than here?

If we hit the project goal of $400, the majority of funds will be used for for final media production needs such as post production work on the intro movie in the form of a movie format conversion software, and then for sound effects for the newly created enemies (which we need several of). We would also look into getting a couple various gamepads for testing (mostly need an XBOX360 gamepad), as well as any other costs that may appear during final production, and creation of the ending artwork.

Any additional money will be put towards expanding on the game itself by adding extra content down the road via extra areas and more equipment, hosting fees, and other project related costs. Also it opens up the likely possibility of a port to XBLIA and potentially other platforms as well! (Crossing our fingers for Linux and Mac!) Any unused money for Core of Innocence will go into Backer rewards and future projects for Pudding Hat Games.

I sincerely thank you for your interest in our project. We welcome any feedback and look forward to hearing from you, and don't forget to like our facebook page! :)

-Don