Adarakion Developer Diary: Issue 49

The end of an era draws near. RoChain beta officially finishes at midday 1^st September 2010 – with our prize for the top score being decided shortly thereafter (scores can be seen here ).  As I said last week, it’s been a real fun time watching people playing the stuff we made. What’s also been great is the professional way in which the beta testers have been providing feedback – it’s meant that we can make the game even better than it is and fix lots of bugs that we didn’t know existed!  Its going to be tight but we are planning on releasing RoChain for free download shortly  (hopefully by the end of the week barring any last minute game breaking bugs)!

All we ask is that if you like the game, drop us a few pounds via our Donate button on the website.  You don’t have to of course, we love you all the same for playing our game, but you’d definitely be on our Christmas Card list if you did*.

So what now? Well, now we move onto Project Blast! in earnest. What is key here, is that we get all the foundations laid properly. We document, we discuss, we plan etc. long before we crack on with the code.  To that end, we identified that none of us are particularly great at that stuff. Don’t get me wrong, we do brainstorm and plan a bit, but not formally, and whilst we do design our stuff a little, we do tend to focus on particular elements and their technical implementation rather than looking at the overall design side of things.

So, to that end, we have recruited a brand spanking new designer – say hello to Richard!  Richard has already done a load of design stuff on Blast! and it’s been refreshing to see lots of new ideas put on the table.  Not all of them will be implemented of course but it’s great to have a pool of ideas to dip into, and play around with.  Personally, it’s given me a whole new outlook on Blast! and what we can achieve with it, if we set our minds to it.

We are also moving forwards with the website.  Whilst the new one is up there, it’s about to change again!  The current site was really only meant as a placeholder whilst we fully implemented all the new stuff we wanted to get on there.  The idea being that we can coincide this with the release of RoChain – so fingers crossed the changes will happen very soon indeed!

It’s interesting being in this transition stage between projects.  It gives us all time to reflect on what we have done and how we have done it along with letting us have, finally, a bit of gaming time too – it’s fair to say we’ve all missed that.  It also means that we can be sure that when we start work on Project Blast! we can do it correctly, and attempt to be a little more organised with our systems.  RoChain was fairly straightforward in terms of allocating tasks and understanding the code.  Blast! will be much more complex, so we need to make sure that we get our systems working how we want them to before we start, otherwise we will all get a bit tied up and lose track of what’s what!

So, to finalise – keep an eye on our site this week – when RoChain finally goes live you will ALL be able to grab a copy and fight for the top spot on the high-score table!  Just keep the fighting clean, nothing below the belt!

*Note. No real Christmas Cards will be sent – but we will be thinking of you!