Well, finally the game is what could be called a late release candidate. There are some things to work out with the installer, and a few help menus that would be nice to add, and perhaps a bit of text and balance tuning, but the game is basically done.

It's been incredibly challenging to get it to this point. The game was overly ambitious for the size of team we ended up with ( 2 ), but now hopefully we get to the rewarding part.

We submitted the game to the Independent Games Festival, and hope to do well there. I imagine we have submitted one of the larger and more ambitious games, so, hopefully that works on our favor. We are out to prove that Indie != Casual.

The last few weeks have been spent bug fixing, polishing, balancing, and doing really fun things like making sure the game runs under Guest user mode on XP & Vista ( it does ), and figuring out the DirectX setup thing.

I added a NPC Follow AI mode, where a npc will follow the character pretty closely, usually without getting in the way, and will fight for you or against you depending on if he's friendly or not.

Also a bunch of more script trigger events, such as the end of a speech, the death of a character, the dismissal of a hint screen, all of which were key to advancing various plot points.

The final game ended up being ~14 levels in size. Our plan is for the shareware version to encompass 5 levels worth, which should be enough for people to get a feel for it and try out the cloning feature.



Readers of this forum are encouraged to contact me if they would like to be game tuning beta testers over the next week or two.