This is sort of an intermediate release that focuses mainly on online multiplayer, which is largely functional, but needs more testing. Aside from polish and bug fixes, the only other things I’m going to add are more weapons and special abilities. And maybe a new level. We’ll see. This release went much smoother than the last two, as I used Panda3D’s built-in packpanda to make the installer. I also cut the installer size down by scaling images, deleting unused files, and resampling music and sounds into the Ogg Vorbis format. It’s incredible what Ogg Vorbis can do; without sacrificing any quality at all, I cut down the music size by about 20%. With a bit of downsampling, it was about 50%. The final installer is 80 Mb, a far cry from the 176 Mb v0.3 installer!
And yet. It’s time to face the facts. While the game is progressing at an incredible pace, it’s not going to be ready by January 9, or even the end of January. So, I guess I failed to meet my deadline. But! I’m not giving up. I’ll still be releasing regular updates, and especially once the multiplayer lobby server is set up, things will start getting a lot more polish. My new goal will be to finish the game before school lets out for the summer. Of course it will be online and playable well before then, but I won’t consider it “finished” until I’m satisfied.
btw, most of this is shamelessly ripped from my dev blog; there's more if it interests you.
Thanks for reading!
~et1337
