Now that we're in the thick of things - there's only a month left in the project - most of the news we have for the public is that we're fixing more bugs and hammering out some of the smaller details. So much of what's left in the game is arting things and making sure that it all fits properly and looks right.

That said we have some good and some bad news. To start our animator is gone for a little while. We knew this coming into the project. Hopefully she'll be back for a week or two in August to put some finishing touches. It's in a state where we are comfortable with what we have, but more is always better.

There's a lot of fancy art things going on. Here is what I can share with you this week...posters! We have some really nice posters that will show up in the tutorial level and possibly throughout the rest of the game. I thought it'd be nice to share some of them so here you go.

Really the big thing now is testing the levels and getting the animations ironed out. They are a pain to get right and are probably the first thing that people will notice if they aren't extremely polished. All we can do is hope that the extra couple animations that we added recently don't hurt the product with what little time we have.

Aside from that we are, as always, fixing many bugs and quirks. We will be having another testing day soon as well which means a lot more feedback and a ton of changes to be made to the game in the coming weeks. The testing day is probably just internal testing but we might pick up some outsiders to get some less biased perspective.

Another week down and that much closer to the end of the summer. It's a bit nerve wracking that we're so close to the end now. It's crept up on all of us I think. That said we're well on track to getting things finished and making it awesome.

I know I promised that I'd get something for you guys about the lighting but it's not quite ready yet. As of last week we only had it implemented in the tutorial level and a very small portion of our first full level. We'd like to get it into the rest of the level and polish up our library portion before showing the world this little thing that we're proud of. So look for that in the near future.

Lastly, there's a high chance that there will be no post next week as a third of the team is gone for the weekend at one of the conventions nearby (if you're going to ConBravo! let us know and perhaps we can meet up at some point) which will keep us busy. Work resumes Monday.

Another bug bites the dust

As the title suggests, we've got a lot of bugs fixed. There's still plenty to go as there always is but we've made a lot of progress when it comes to getting a working game.

This has been a very productive week for everything from getting the animations in - we've got sheep and wolves added - to some major camera improvements. So lets get into some specifics now shall we.

We had some very interesting new bugs crop up this last week. We were trying to make some improvements to the way we had the conveyor belts working. The "improvements" led to some very slow belts. Phenomenally slow belts. We haven't fixed that entirely yet so for the time being we've reverted back to the original set of belts. Speaking of slow things, we've had some strange interactions with the sheep animations that cause them to fall very slowly. It's actually quite comical to watch them fall slowly while apparently flapping their ears.

Animations. We've got all of the sheep animations in and nearly all of them are working perfectly. Easy fix I'm sure but not something that would've been easy to catch at the start. Lots of bugs to track down and fix but we've got them mostly under control. Wolves are also in! As I'm typing this I have some of the crew working setting up the animation tree. Can't share any more of that with you yet but the wolves look pretty cool. We haven't even gotten the bubbling wolves in yet. A couple other things we got into it are the edge grab animations and cycles, it looks pretty fancy so far. She can actually hold onto the edge and pull herself up. This is another one of those things where small imperfections will stand out so we'll be continuing to work on stuff like this where we need to.

Enough about animation, on to the fun camera improvements. Throughout testing we found that there were many issues with the frame that the player was looking through. So we've constructed a room camera to get around a lot of these issues and I have to say that it looks wonderful. We're discussing some options for switching between the regular player camera and the room camera but that's one of those design decisions that's easy to implement but has larger over-reaching consequences. I'm sure it will go through a fair bit of testing as well.

Speaking of testing, we have another build getting compiled today. Another round of internal testing. Last time we had a bunch of people from outside the projects come in to check out our games and play around with them but now it's just the faculty and other students. This means a lot of bug hunting and testing. While it might sound like there's tons of work to be done, things are moving along smoothly. We're getting a lot done and we should be hitting all of our goals. These sorts of projects are a lot of work.

Lastly we've got some really cool lighting effects getting set up right now but it's pretty far from being finished so all I can give you is a teaser image of the one tiny section that we've got working and hint at a feature article about our lighting when we have the time. So for now, here's a low-rez shot of some light effects.