Новостной вброс номер два

It’s now mid-April and the days are ticking by at an alarming rate. We’ve been extremely busy at our end, working on a variety of things. For the past week or so I’ve actually been the bottleneck, as I’ve demanded everyone work harder and they have. I’ve ended up being buried under the results.

Our plans for the future are (as many of you already know) to do a Kickstarter. There’s been some discussion about how we can get around the US citizen requirement that Kickstarter has, and after exhausting a lot of possibilities over the past month I think we’ve finally hit on one that works. My thanks go out to our forumite Kilrathi, who is a corporate attorney over in the US and has helped us set up a US company and is in the process of setting up a corporate bank account for us.

This, while costing us a few hundred dollars, is a safe option for us – I can have full control over the bank account and Kilrathi is therefore not on the hook taxwise at all. It has, naturally, involved a LOT of form filling for the both of us, but I’m about to run off to get the final forms signed before FedExing them across the world. I imagine it’ll still take a couple of weeks for everything to come together, but Kilrathi has been a fantastic help and it goes to show that where there is a will, there is a way!

The plan is to release a public build of the game to accompany the Kickstarter, so anyone who is interested in pledging money is able to see what we have done so far before they make their call. I think the game is sufficiently complete for people to get a feel of what we are aiming to achieve with the final version, and I think this will dramatically increase the funding we receive.

We will be sending this build out about a week early to the press so they can write previews on it. Most journalists don’t want to cover Kickstarters anymore, so letting them combining the Kickstarter with a preview should ensure we still get good coverage. There’s been quite a lot of interest from various sites in getting their hands on a playable version of the game too, which is good.

The net effect of this is that we’re going to have to have the “final” version done relatively soon so we can have a couple of days of bugtesting on the forums before we get it out to the journalists. We’ll then have a week of extra bugtesting before public release of the build.

This public build will be V10. It is likely to include the following features over V9.31:

-Enhanced launcher which will allow you to play the normal game or load a “Quick Game” (which launches straight into a terror site) for those who just want to try a quick battle. It will looks prettier, and also include direct links to our manual, bug reporting forums, and our preorder / Kickstarter page.

-The standalone builds will have an installer.

-The town tileset will be set up properly, though the art still won’t be entirely complete as not all the tiles have been painted over yet.

-We’ll hopefully have added an alien support drone to the game, which will appear in the Terror Site.

-UFO signals should display their proper size, rather than Medium.

-We should have a few more Xenopedia images, and we’ll finish formatting and scaling the text in it too.

-That’s what we’ll be working on for the next few days. You can see much of what we’ve been working on in the past couple of weeks in

Build V9.31, but the one major thing that we’ve been working on and have not released is the base defence missions.

I’m pleased to say that, from a code perspective, these are pretty much complete. We’ve now worked out a system where the walls and doors display correctly on each side of each room depending on whether or not there is another structure there (accounting correctly for the 2x1 buildings too). These are currently loading up blank grey placeholder rooms, but we’ll be moving onto those tiles as soon as the Town is done.

The major innovation in the base defence missions is that there is a central command centre that must be protected at all costs, and that you can arrange your troops within it (it is a 2x2 building) freely before the start of the battle. We’re just tweaking the unit arrangement system a bit so it’s immediately obvious which tiles you can deploy units to for free, and then we’re largely complete.

There is also a system where most rooms have “key props” in them, which can be destroyed in battle. At the end of the battle the number of surviving key props is totalled up to give a health % for each structure, and any damaged building is set back to that % construction completed. This means that most buildings can be knocked out of commission for a few days as a result of a base attack. This system has been implemented in the ground combat but not linked to the Geoscape yet.

Unfortunately our AI coder is moving house this week so our progress on that front hasn’t been as fast as we’d like, but I’m going to make that a priority again after we get the Kickstarter build out.

Overall, things are going well – but the next couple of weeks will be very important for us and we’re going to need to make them work.