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Well, you all get a real long one this time, since it has been a while since I have written. And to answer you all, it is because we've been REALLY busy, not because nothing has happened. :)
Anyway, it looks like we have gotten almost all of the design into the game and all of the areas will be done from a scripting perspective this week. This is a little later than I hoped, but this was because we re-wrote a couple of areas to have them make more sense. So, some people would call this implementation and others would call it tweaking. You decide.
The movies are due from all the artists next Monday and things are looking pretty good for that to happen. One of the movies might be a little late, but it shouldn't hurt us too bad.
Art continues to go into the game and the artists working on Critters really have kicked some ass. We've been able to populate a lot of the areas with a lot more new people, and one of the party members even got his own special character.
Now having said all of that, we still have a lot to do. We need to balance the game and come up with some new systems to get everything we promised in the game. One of the latest things we were working on was the ability for your Party Members to develop over the course of the game. We came up with a pretty good system over the past few days (Yes a bunch of us are doing the 7 day work week right now) that was implemented yesterday. We just have to put a bunch of data in for it over the next couple of days and we should know if it is working out.
Programming wise I had our Lead Programmer put a little tweak in that has critters run in combat if they use more than 50% of their AP's for movement during a turn. It turned out to both speed up combat (not it's main purpose) but also to make things a lot more active.
So I know you are all going to ask me what areas had to be redesigned and if we are just going to cheese them. :) Well the two main areas that had to be redesigned were the Den and Navarro. I won't go into details about Navarro because that would give a lot of the game away, but the Den just didn't really move the player towards where he needed to go next and people weren't sure what actually was supposed to happen in the area. This was because about three designers had touched it, and it needed one solid redesign which was done by Dave Hendee - and we didn't have to beat him too much to get him to do it on time either. However, as of today, the "new" Den is already in and being tested.
To sum up, a lot of things have been going on for the past couple of weeks and our Quality Assurance Department is feeling a lot better about the game. They tend to be a little more pessimistic about things then us - which we often need. But I have seen the occasional smile on their faces lately.
And lastly, the date is still Fall. I get a lot of E-mail from everyone asking what the EXACT date is, and I wish I could give it to you guys. Two things stop me from doing it. (1) Since we just went public we have to be careful about the dates we release because of the investors (2) Pinning a final date on big projects like this is REALLY tough and I don't want to get everybody's expectations up about a certain date and then missing it.
As always if you have any questions just ask,
-Feargus ([email protected])
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