We are currently finishing the last few jobs on our ToDo-lists that should be completed before the first alpha. As soon as that's done, we'll start our first round of alpha testing, which is a very exciting prospect!
In our last devblog-entry, we've reported on our first successful transfer of a complete dungeon. But what did we do since then?
First of all, there are now more tiles - most of them drawn by ourselves, some provided by a good friend of ours (thanks!). So now, you'll have more choice when buying tiles. Additionally, this means there'll be more variety in the dungeons, and they won't all look the same.
Tiles are still sold by our merchant, and he's great at selling them, telling you stories you wouldn't believe about them! We've uploaded a shot of it, so you can judge for yourself.
As far as server-stuff is concerned, we fixed a few bugs in the dungeon-editing process. The player now cannot change rooms or dungeons that are "activate" in the game. Also, a few more technical things that simply have to be done so the whole system works.
Finally, there was another one of our "Server-client-communication-breakthroughs" (a term we might just trademark sometime). The client now automatically updates itself - it downloads new tiles, items, and orbs (special abilities) all by itself, so we can easily add more new content. We'll do something similar for enemies, too - though the internal workings of that differ from what we've just implemented.
We're thinking of having our first alpha testing session in about two weeks. It'll be interesting to see just how wrong our initial "balancing"-values were! :)
We'll keep you updated!
So long!
(The image for this news shows a small snippet of the Room Editor, in which you click those rooms together, as well as the edited room in the downloadable client. It's nothing too fancy, yet, but we'll redesign the editor sometime soon, and then show a complete shot of it!)
