The more things change…

Well, a lot is going on here in our musty basement, and I suppose it’s time to fill you all in on everything.

First, we are going through a bit of a staff cycling. At least one of the artists who have worked with us since October will be winding down his development work over the next couple of weeks and finishing off some really great concept pieces showing the world of the game in general.

Because of this, we are looking to bring on a few new artists to do the actual game assets. We are currently interviewing a number of very talented people who have shown real interest in the project. We are very optimistic that we will be filling desks with people who can pick up from where our excellent concept artists have left off.

In other news, we are in the process of incorporating. We filed for S-Corp status as of Tuesday of this week, and we will be hopefully moving forward as a full fledged company by the middle of April. With that will come a real company website and a real honest to goodness name.

We are pushing forward with programming and music at this time and though a lot of my time is eaten up by speaking with artists, I am still working on getting our game engine in shape and looking into the new promises that XNA 3.1 is offering.

From a purely game engine point of view, there are a few things that still need to be developed. An engine for scripted events is in its infant stage and still needs to be further fleshed out. We currently have no audio system, and we are holding off until XACT3 comes out to really start to tackle that aspect of the game. And finally, cut scenes (as opposed to scripted events) are yet to be worked out. For everything that needs to get done in the game, these are small things (though audio is admittedly a fairly large undertaking).

We are also going through a series of small story changes and tweaks to flesh out some of the background of the game and the things you’ll be encountering. We’re hoping that this gives a slightly more engaging narrative experience for the player.

And that’s it, for now. Other than the large refrigerator with it’s obligatory flickering light we’ve just had installed in anticipation of becoming a corporation, we are still working in the same broken down sub basement that we’ve been in since August of last year. But there seems to be a slight breeze of change blowing through. Though that may just be the herd of rats changing direction again out in the far corner of our dank and dreary offices.

Slow, Slow Progress

So here we are, the middle of March, when I had hoped to be getting our website up and the first few screen shots out to the public to reveal the game we’ve been working on since August. However, due to unforeseen hurdles, we’re not quite there yet. We are hoping now to have something by the end of April. Fingers Crossed.

From the programming side, I’ve been making a few changes to the way the engine runs and how object interact with each other. Things are getting much closer to done on the programming side, though there will be massive amounts of testing to do once I have real assets in the game building tools I’m designing.

This brings me to a point of discussion that the team has been having. Since the Xbox 360 limit for file size is 150MB compressed, we are going to have to make some sacrifices for the console version of the game. However, we are planning on a PC version that we will release afterward with more music, more sound effects, higher resolution art, and possibly an extra thing or two in the game. The PC version will probably be slightly more expensive than the Xbox version (we’re talking like a dollar here), to make up for the extra effort in that one.

We are also getting close to getting our website up and our game revealed. A bit more work on the team’s part and we will be giving you a small glimpse of what we hope will be an exciting new XNA game for both the Xbox 360 and the PC.

Until then, I’ll keep you posted on our progress as it comes up.