Another month, another Dev Diary. I’m writing this at 2am after 6 hours of coding, so excuse the lack of coherence.
- Got four absolute monsters of assignments for January hand-ins. Ouch.
- Interviewed for TSS. Hopefully a link will be up soon.
- More source slicing. What’s left is a lot tighter than before. Hopefully the weekend shall yield more results.
- Started writing an A* algorithm for the enemy AI (as well as an article to go with it.) It’s not as easy as I thought, but it should be done soon.
- More design doc, more website.
- Worked on SODA some more. Completely overhauled the interface.
- Started plans for the Atari SO.
- More website stuff.
- Did the Hussien Skank.
My bed looks very comfy. Night!
Seeing as Devlyn was showing off SMEE yesterday, I thought maybe you Shining Online fans would like to get a small peak at the tools I’ve written for SO.
Here’s a screen of SODA (Shining Online Development Application).
I may post more at a later date. Whether or not the package will be released is undecided though.
Yep, as anyone who gets the newsletter would have known yesterday, a special LAN edition of Shining Online is currently being developed by the Good Ty. We hope to have it completed within the next two weeks, giving us plenty of time to iron out the kinks in the battle system and generally have a good time insulting and hacking each other to pieces.
As I said in the newsletter, this multiplayer edition will not be made available to the general public, although we will probably release some lovely screenshots of us insulting each other in our favourite ways. Great stuff.
Keep the faith!
Edit: I forgot to mention this – for those who want to subscribe to future issues of the newsletter, send an email to newts@shining-online.co.uk with “subscribe newsletter” somewhere, either in the subject or main body, and I’ll make sure you get the next issue along! :)
It’s a bit odd that I’m posting news about a newsletter… oh well, this is just to let our subscribers know the latest edition of the Shining Online newsletter will be released on Monday, hopefully with none of the annoying glitches that have plagued us in the past :P
For all those people pestering us about the Demo 4 release, stop it! We’re both still working out little cotton socks off to get the demo finished as soon as we can, and as I said in the interview [in the articles section, if you’ve not already read it :P] I think a December release is certainly a realistic expectation, bordering on sensible :P
Ty and myself interviewed Devlyn yesterday, so we hope to have that uploaded for your delight in the very near future, and we also have a whole load of interviews planned :)
That’s about all my news I think, keep the SO faith!
PS Congratulations to Dev for managing quite some updates recently :P
Wow, haven’t been keeping up to date, have I? Sometimes I get a little suprised by just how long SO has been dragging itself along. Anyway, here’s some updates!
- Finished Skies Of Arcade. It’s really quite good, so buy it for your DC (and the GameCube version too!)
- Sliced more guff out of the source code, speeding the game up a tad. Plus it made me feel better. You learn a lot of coding tricks in a year, and the source is beginning to how it’s age.
- Got a nice installer working, which should prevent people from getting errors with the new demo. I hope.
- Added some new functionality to the website (not online yet though =P ), as well as some integration with the game. I’m quite proud of that bit.
- Wrote 26 pages of design doc. Not a lot really, but I’m not very good at writing lots of guff.
- Added some of the cameo sprites, but I’m still waiting for more (*hint hint!*)
- Did lots of university work =\
- Started the mammoth task of finishing the level editor, and adding “Super Mega Event Editor”
- Released a demo of Sonic Groove (Here)
- Thought about canning SO. Quite liked the idea, too!
- Canned SO (see news)
- Realised it was a bad joke.
- Newts wrote more music.
- And more music.
- Got hassled to release the next demo. When it’s ready, you fiends!
I should really get back to work now. Hope you enjoyed this rather poor update!
