Earliest Post Ever

Friday is going to be a busy day so decided to post my blog in the morning instead, and this way ensure that something gets posted as I will be leaving the office at 3PM today to celebrate someones birthday and help myself to the local mead.

My task list is quite meager today with just three crash bugs to attend (and as I write this at 7:30AM I have already fixed two of them), and currently looking at a report that the Fantasy Characters (third party content) was crashing the new character animation system, so that has been dealt with though you can see from the shot above that the relative difference in size between these and the new Reloaded once are causing the chappies to float a little.  I dare say there will be a lot of work and tweaks to the engine as more custom content comes in and needs to be anticipated correctly when importing.

Given the 'seaming' abundance of time, I will be spending most of it building and testing versions, and of course uploading Steam editions as this will be our new testing ground in February in accordance with our plan to start testing the Steam infrastructure and the Multiplayer as part of the main experience.

The plan at the start of the year was to spend all January adding the remaining core functionalism and all of February testing it, with a release to Early Access in March in time for GDC.  It's great that this plan has worked so far, and I am looking forward to making lots of maps and testing every corner of the software, and it's very rare I get a WHOLE MONTH to test something prior to release so done correctly I think we can assure ourselves of a stable release.  Granted we still need to add lots of things, lots more optimization opportunities and increase the available content, but as 'core engine' products go, I think it will present as an interesting product to many Steam users who perhaps have had their fill of playing game after game, and would not mind making one for a change.

Exciting times ahead and looking forward to seeing how our 'very tentative' Steam pre-test goes this weekend with our alpha testers, as this will be the first time we have used Steam keys for a beta test!  Fingers crossed :)