Oh dear, we skipped a month last month. Was it because we all decided to take a month off and sit about, sipping chilled beers? No, it's because we were all working ridiculously hard, making a big push towards getting the game complete. Hopefully the beers will come later...
So, when we last spoke I was talking about moving onto writing the story and text for the game, and I did indeed do that. I've written the briefings for most of the levels, although new developments mean that we may be changing some of those (more on that in a moment). I also made a start on the background story items that will be unlocked as the player finds hidden data canisters around the levels. I've only written a couple of those so far but I've worked out the contents of all of the others. I've also written descriptions for a lot of the items available to equip in the game. Those proved tricky to start with as it was hard making a one or two line description interesting - most were turning into simple, dry descriptions of the item. So I started making them a bit...well...silly, and they instantly came to life. Lee and Mal dug the new direction, so that was how I did the rest. We want to keep the rest of the game mostly serious, although there are some funny moments in there as well, but the item descriptions feel divorced enough from the rest of the game to handle being made funny.
The new development I alluded to earlier is that Lee had made a huge leap forward in the Artificial Intelligence of the non-player characters. I won't go into massive details (and that's not because I don't understand it, no Siree) but the upshot is that we can now have some pretty big battles with friendly and enemy units shooting merry hell out of each other. And now we have those kinds of capabilities, it means we're going to redesign a couple of the existing levels to make better use of them.
But that's for the future, what we've been doing for the last month is pushing towards getting a final demo sorting out. This is a bit of a larger task than it might seem as it basically involves getting the vast majority of the game up to final standards. To aid us in this task we've recruited a small posse of Beta testers who are currently playing the game, searching for bugs and giving their opinions about how the game plays. To be honest, it's been a big moment for all three of us - we've been working on the game for two years now and we've hardly shown it to anyone in that time. To suddenly be unleashing in on a dozen or so people is a bit daunting. But, it should make the game better in the long run, so it's a necessary evil. And we're going to have to show it off at some point anyway, or the last two years will have been a bit of a waste of time.
And with that I'll leave you for now. Hopefully the next time we speak I'll be able to give you more concrete details on the public release of the demo. For now sleep well, and may your dreams be full of the vanquishing of your enemies on the surface of a distant world. Or sheep, it's up to you.
