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Fan art competition

As you know, Demo 4 is going to be released in just over three weeks, and to celebrate we’re hosting an official Shining Online Fan Art competition!

All you have to do is draw and submit your own piece of SOnline fanart and email it to me here. All art will be displayed on the website in a special fan art gallery, and the best piece will be picked by Ty, Hannah [she’ll be here :P] and myself on April 25th, with the winner getting a very special, as-yet unnamed prize. How mysterious!

Rules and regulations.

Please, try to keep pictures small. Ideally, we’d like artwork to be in PNG format, but for anyone who can’t do that, save your work as a BMP file and use WinZip to compress it, then send it along to me.

Feel free to use any available tools, but you Photoshoppers will be marked down for using lens flares without good cause :P

Please, be original! Use your imagination when thinking of situations, landscapes and even characters – we don’t just want a dozen pictures of Cody standing still, put some action in there! Art is as much about imagination as ability.

The decision of the judges is final, but bribes are welcome :P

Finally, have fun, and good luck!

The winner will be picked on April the 25th, 2003. You have until then to email your work to me, so get drawing!

Demo 4 release date (again)

27th of April (2003 :P).

In a bid to encourage me to work, Dev has threatened to release the demo 4 beta I sent him a while back if I don’t release something first. Isn’t he kind :P

You will get something, and it will be worth waiting for. Hopefully taking time off to do demo 4 won’t affect my university grade (much) ;)

Expect many more updates in the coming weeks, as I race to beat the maniacal Devlyn and his army of robot bratwurst…

Making of Demo 4…

After the success of a similarly-named topic at Ye Olde Blah, Ty and I have decided to produce an article on the development process of Demo 4, and how SO has evolved since the release of Demo 3 at the end of 2001. Expect to see screenshots, developmental sketches, more screenshots and lots of other nice stuff :)

I hope you can consider your SO appetite well and truly whetted :P

Online progress

Still a long way to go, but I’ve been fiddling with online options recently. Unsuprisingly, it looks like it’s going to be a lot of work to get anything remotely playable done.

Got something very nice to show. I’m hoping to have some shots of it up next weekend. ;)

I suppose I should get around to finishing Demo 4 :P No idea when it’ll be ready now. I want to add more to it, so it could be quite a while.

It WILL be worth the wait :P

Some news

I’m sure you were all hoping that demo 4 was going to be released today, but I’m afraid you’ll all have to wait a little longer :P

Uni work has taken much of my time recently, but I’m trying to do some work on the demo. At the moment I’ve got a nice list of things that need fixing, so I’m plugging away at that. There’s also several features that I want to add before release. None are particularly special, but I won’t be happy until they’re in. Thanks for sticking with us and being patient, we realise how annoying it is to wait for something.

Aside from that, I’ve been working on the multiplayer aspects of the game. All the multiplayer modes are now designed, and it’s just a case of sorting out a few major details before I can start working on them. I hope to have screens of Newts and myself battling in the next few weeks.

SODA continues to grow, and I’m currently overhauling some of it’s core elements. More screens of that should be ready soon too. I’m quite pleased with how it’s looking, though more pleased with the programming that I’ve done to get it this far. It should be a pretty hefty piece of kit when it’s finished, though I’m still unsure as to whether it will become publicly available. Most of the features could cause an unfair advantage to some players (as well as causing errors online), so it’s something of a risk I’m not happy about taking.

I want to try and post news more regularly now. I’ve been slacking recently, so I apologise for that.

The future holds only good things!

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