It's great to be here! news

In the long run nothing other than finally getting feedback on progress and suggestions. Since the start of 2011 we've been working on this project simply as a team of two (admittedly it initially started off with me working on the project alone) so it's been hard making sure we don't waste too much time on things that aren't important and focus ourselves more on what the player wants to see in the game, recreating Daikatana as it was in 1997 is one thing but making sure that people actually enjoy it or even want to play it is another thing entirely. Lately keeping focus has been something we've struggled with a little, especially as we begin rewriting large portions of the engine and have to then spend time updating documentation or just letting each other know where things have been moved; quite honestly it's a real pain. Before we ditched QuakeC we amusingly had the game-logic about 60% complete but after having a few issues I decided to "roll the dice" as they say and move all the game-logic into C, most of the basic stuff was finished in about a week but then ended up being revised several times to just make it more readable or easier to manage. I pretty much spend everyday revising a lot of the code so expect a lot of "revised" comments everywhere in the code!
I'm sure there's going to be a lot that won't be finished by release so when the game is near completion I'll most likely end up creating my own copy of the source and trimming it down until we get something clean which I can release, of course that would be the same code for the build of the game you'll play and we'll release all that at the same time as the release of the game (as those are the requirements of GPL). "Take your time with it" is what I'm sure a lot of people will say, things don't need to be cut since we don't have any pressure but to be quite honest I think both of us just want to get this thing done, I know I do and the only thing which keeps me sane is working on the engine or cleaning up the game-logic. But that's not to say we're going to just shove this out the door, anything you work on should always have the dedication to make sure it turns out to be a good project/product and I really am dedicated to working on this despite my lack of interest in the game itself, gameplay-wise it should be a blast and I will of course play it when we finally release it.

As I stated earlier we really do plan on improving on a lot of the design and of Daikatana for OpenKatana to make sure that the game is much more friendly to newer players while also offering a real challenge, it's a matter of balancing everything really so that players don't feel frustrated with the game. Shooting an enemy should be satisfying which is something we're rather focused on achieving in OpenKatana.

Finally I'm not sure how many people on this site visit daikatananews.net but if you have then I hope you've seen a lot of the news on this project during its development. All future updates will probably be here on Moddb so you can more easily find them though there may be some things on my blog (if there is then I'll add a link) and not only that but I do hope to make updates more frequently since I'm sure none of you like being left in the dark.

Thanks for reading guys and I hope you're excited for OpenKatana! If you'd like to ask any questions then please feel free to do so in the comments section below, if I don't respond then I'll most likely respond to it in an upcoming pod-cast.

~hogsy