Don’t worry, we’re still alive. Just been working hard. Still goin at this full-time, even though I’ve gone back to pizza delivery by night and Jonny and Ty are taking a few hours of school. We’re focusing all our efforts to get our new Unstoppable trailer out, because once that happens...everything will change. The earth might just collapse in on itself as a result of the insane amount of hype that’s released into the atmosphere. Yeah, it’s gonna be a big deal.
So what’s taking us so long? Well, after we saw our new graphics and realized the potential this game has, we decided to go all out and make this the biggest and best game it can possibly be. That means online play. Now, networking isn’t something you can just add in on top of a game, it has to be put in on “ground-zero”...so Jonny had to do some back-tracking to make it happen (and a whole lot of research and studying), and there’s still lots of networking code left to go, he’s only just finished the preliminary stage.
We also decided to completely change the level design. Instead of just one open square level after another, we’ll now have huge scrolling levels, with rooms and corridors and keys and exploration and puzzles (if you don’t like puzzles, don’t worry, there won’t be too many and some will be optional or hidden, and most of them will be very action-oriented). In light of this, we had to make a fully-featured level editor (which we’ll release, so for those of you who want to, say, remake the first dungeon from Zelda 1, you could totally do that).
Jordan is working hard on level art, but his time is limited due to another job. He’s really producing some quality stuff though. We’ve recently gotten really organized with him, with all his task due dates planned out on our Google Doc calendar.
Lastly, the bad news: Egoraptor is no longer working on the cutscenes and spritework (queue all the JForce haters rejoicing at the thought of our failure). He had spent several months on this game and said it was turning into a career instead of a commission job and that he wanted to focus on his own stuff. We did offer him more money, but he said he just couldn’t do another 5 months on this. Looks like the reason he was able to do this, is because he had just became a Youtube Partner, so he’s now able to make a pretty nice income working on his own stuff, which is every artists' dream. On the bright side, he said he’ll still do all the voice-work and pimp us out on his Youtube and Newgrounds channels (which is pretty critical). And the work he was able to get done is top-notch. The first cutscene is finished (clocks in at 91 seconds) and it is absolutely hilarious. Most of the spritework is done too, and it’s equally impressive. He has most of the other cutscenes rough-drafted out as you saw in the video, and I can say right now, not only will this be the best indie game of all time, but the funniest game of all time as well.
So, we’re currently on the hunt for a new animator who can match his style.
And if you haven’t checked out that preview in Avatar Massage Online, DO IT. Also, for those of you who don’t know, we went through this huge ordeal in trying to get that game released. We were treated pretty unfairly by several members of the XNA community, and all the criticisms we received throughout that entire debacle were all unjustified and easily refutable. Wait for our upcoming comprehensive blog post which covers our whole side of the debate before you start to mouth-off about us “only caring about the money”. I mean really, we’re gonna end up spending over 4 years on a freakin’ top-down shooter and people say we have no passion. Yeah, okay.
