6/18 Development Status Report
Posted: Fri Jun 18, 2004 8:57 pm
At the risk of throwing raw meat to the Sharks (my favorite hockey team), here's my limited view of what's been going on in development the past few weeks.
Around the beginning of June we had a pretty solid game. We were frantically working on the manual, which was a beast in its own right. David was working on getting higher quality sound and music files for the game. Knowing that we had some time to kill while the manual and sound/music were being finished, we continued to fix some annoying bugs as they were discovered. Most of these were small bugs or undesirable features that we could have lived with if we needed to. Of course with a game this complicated, any change has a chance of creating additional problems, and occasionally a bigger issue would pop up that we needed to fix. At this moment, we have no major issues outstanding.
The manual was finally sent off for layout about a week ago. The game manual came out to be 220 pages and we have 325+ pages of total documentation on the CD. Mike Eckenfels (game and editor manuals) and Richard Porter (tutorial guide) put in a lot of effort along with Marc Schwanebeck (PDF layout) to make these as informative as we could get them.
While David was working on the sound and music we realized that with a few changes to the sound engine, we could reduce the size of the files dramatically. Again, since we had the time, it made sense to try to do this. From what I understand, Matrix is just finishing up the sound and music files now and should be in a position to put together a complete game sometime within the next few days. This will still give time to test the final gold version and duplicate CDs for Origins.
Although we would have been happy to have been finished a few weeks ago, the extra time has resulted in a few more items being cleaned up, and hopefully much better (and smaller) sound/music in the final product. Anything can happen, but I know that David, Matrix and 2by3 are all doing everything possible to get the game out for Origins and then shortly (as soon as possible) thereafter for the Matrix Store. Now you know the real story (at least from where I'm sitting).
-Joel
Around the beginning of June we had a pretty solid game. We were frantically working on the manual, which was a beast in its own right. David was working on getting higher quality sound and music files for the game. Knowing that we had some time to kill while the manual and sound/music were being finished, we continued to fix some annoying bugs as they were discovered. Most of these were small bugs or undesirable features that we could have lived with if we needed to. Of course with a game this complicated, any change has a chance of creating additional problems, and occasionally a bigger issue would pop up that we needed to fix. At this moment, we have no major issues outstanding.
The manual was finally sent off for layout about a week ago. The game manual came out to be 220 pages and we have 325+ pages of total documentation on the CD. Mike Eckenfels (game and editor manuals) and Richard Porter (tutorial guide) put in a lot of effort along with Marc Schwanebeck (PDF layout) to make these as informative as we could get them.
While David was working on the sound and music we realized that with a few changes to the sound engine, we could reduce the size of the files dramatically. Again, since we had the time, it made sense to try to do this. From what I understand, Matrix is just finishing up the sound and music files now and should be in a position to put together a complete game sometime within the next few days. This will still give time to test the final gold version and duplicate CDs for Origins.
Although we would have been happy to have been finished a few weeks ago, the extra time has resulted in a few more items being cleaned up, and hopefully much better (and smaller) sound/music in the final product. Anything can happen, but I know that David, Matrix and 2by3 are all doing everything possible to get the game out for Origins and then shortly (as soon as possible) thereafter for the Matrix Store. Now you know the real story (at least from where I'm sitting).
-Joel
. 
! I'll drink to that.