Week ??: Starship Troopers

Welcome back everyone! I'm going to start this week off by saying I have no idea which week it is. I might be a week or two behind on the numbering so I'm going to drop it and just have more fun with the titles.

Alpha testing was a huge success with a couple notable problems.

To start we had a few very common almost game-breaking bugs with the way our levels were streamed/built. At one point if a player died they would respawn into an unloaded area of the map. Easy fix but was frustrating during testing.

We had a few other gravity quirks and some stuck issues but for the most part we got some great feedback so thanks to everyone who came out and tested games for all of the groups. While I can't actually speak for the other groups I'm sure they get a bunch of great feedback from you guys as well.

Back to real news though.

Over the radio silence we had some exciting days. We had a sound tech come to a farm with us for some sheep sounds! As you can see there are also some images we got from the excursion. I'll include several more of them before the end of today and perhaps some more over the week if people are enjoying them.

We've got some test music for our ambience and we aren't ready to really share it just yet. We also haven't gotten many other sounds into the game just yet. Because it's an interdisciplinary part of the game (sound tech and musicians and programmers), it will likely be a while before we can really get moving with that section.

As always we have been getting a lot of the art and design into the game but right now the biggest and most important parts of development right now are the bug fixes. We have an incredibly long list of bugs, most of which are minor and some a quite major, that we're working down. The vast majority of our time is devoted to finding and fixing these bugs.

Lastly we're continually editing the levels. The tutorial is likely to go through another 20 to 30 revisions before we settle on something we like. We're hopefully going to get another level in before the end of the summer.



I'd like to give a special thanks to CFA (guesses at what it stands for in the comments, don't ruin it if you already know) for allowing us to go out there to record some of their sheep and take some pictures. As I said before everything is about bug fixes and the camera right now so enjoy the pictures of sheep.

Weeks 3, 4, and 5: Nothing to see here, move along.

Welcome back. Lets start by saying that there's not a whole lot that's been going on that I can share with everyone aside from: everything is moving along smoothly.

Animations are coming along nicely. Bo now has the beginnings of an edge grab animation among some other important bits. As always there are lots of improvements across the other completed animations such as extra frames and touch ups. Not a whole lot to share on that front aside from lots of progress.

In other news, the tutorial has been through at least a dozen passes and is constantly going through more. It's looking pretty good right now with a few rough spots that need a bit more iteration and inspiration. There are also two (2) other levels that are getting built though they're not as finished as our tutorial level.

There's so much that's been going on with the programmers that it's really hard to get all of it to you in a meaningful way so here's the two largest things that I feel are important.

1 - Checkpoints and saving. We've got the beginnings of the checkpoints and saving functions in the game and will be working on it more as time goes on. Now when you die in a level you don't have to start it all over again. This also means we can start putting things together. Levels wont have to be separate things loaded up independently. This leads into getting the game flow (between menus and getting into levels etc) up and running.

2 - More camera work! The camera is looking really nice now and is into more revisions. The panning or peeking as some are calling it is a lot smoother than it used to be.

There's a whole lot more going on under the hood but these are the things that people might notice coming into the game, things you might not notice such as tweaks to things like slippery surfaces and better level flipping gravity without having seen it before are also happening.

Lastly, the big news. We have our first alpha testing day coming up next week. Right now we're all in a mad dash to get things ready for testing so there's not a whole lot to show. With that in mind we wont be here next week but we will be back the week after. We're going to be extremely busy focusing on the feedback from testing and getting things ready for testing that we'll see you in 2 weeks!