Friday Ho Ho Ho

The Last Day - Officially

According to the spreadsheet I laughably call my Holiday Calender, this is the last TGC work day.  Being CEO and Founder, you might think I would not bother with such a regimented system for recovery and rest, but it's all part of the magical machine. 

I say officially because I don't imagine, in my wildest dreams, that I am actually going to clock off this evening and then return to work on the 2nd January 2014.  I am pretty sure my time between here and there will be occupied between playing some FPS games and adding to our FPS creator :)

In testing the latest beta, due later today, I found myself in 'play mode' and came up with this shot:

I started to imagine all sorts of cool things such as shop keepers I could trade items with, civilians walking about minding their own business, ladders so I could get to the roof tops, closed and locked doors and windows I could bash or pick open, the sounds of the night and the daily buzz of a small village, some creepy zombies hiding in the shadows, dynamic lighting effects for camp fires, lanterns, shop interiors and glowing eyed vampires, dust and tumble weeds kicking about in small wind swirls, maybe some light rain causing the cobbles to slowly reflect the buildings above, cloth physics hangings draped from open doorways and windows.  All this was swimming in my head as I wondered around my completely empty village, and it was exciting to know that most of the hard work is either behind me or in my immediate sights. I knew 2014 would be the year when all my imaginary features would slowly transform the reality of the engine, and found myself tempted to start all of them at once.

Of course the reality is that I am but one person, and I chose a very small team to help me get there.  For this I apologize, and beg your patience as I build this edifice one brick at a time.  I want this castle to stand the test of time. Other coders thought I was daft to build a castle here, but I built it anyway. It sank into the swamp. So I built another one,  that sank into the swamp. I built a third one...that burned down, fell over then sank into the swamp. But the forth one stayed up, and that's what you're going to get from me, the strongest castle in these isles.

BETA TIME

I am presently putting final touches and testing to the 1.004 BETA version, set for release later tonight, which I think you will approve as a good version to play with over Christmas.  As I hinted, I will be continuing the development over the festive season, focusing a little more on some critical yet fun stuff like more sounds, basic logic that's missing and any critical horrors that are found with 1.004 in December.

I have not decided whether this minor Christmas patch will be for GOLD pledgers only, as it falls outside the scheduled releases, so if you're not a GOLD pledger I strongly advise you to pledge now while the discount is in effect so you can get your hands on this 'potential' fun update ;)

Signing Off

Still plenty hours in my day so will carry on testing and tweaking. It's 6:44PM here in the UK and I aim to start uploading the final installer for 1.004 around 10PM so wherever you are in the world, do the time-zone math and get ready for a new update!