We have made a great deal of incremental progress and started plans for some bigger changes. John is busy in Canada building up the User Interface System to be more robust, easier to use and have a more complete set of widgets. Gary and Nastasja have created enough art and 3d models to complete four levels, Joe has made incremental progress on the saving and loading of engine components to make level loading.

Catch Alpha-Version Screen Shot

Together, we have made something that vaguely resembles a game, the game we planned from the beginning. Its still rough though. It doesn’t yet support many of the original planned game or graphical features. Level loading is pending until Joe finishes the critical parts of serialisation. Graphical features like anti-aliasing are planned and will likely be implemented by John. Guiding the design and art theme while adding adorable faces to everything is the responsibility of Natasja. While Gary continues to make high quality 3d models for the remaining levels to be made. There are many things yet to complete, but we are always getting closer.

In addition to the fleshing out of old ideas, there are some new ideas too. Joe and John have discussed and began tests for multiple monitor support and multi-threading in core components of the engine, and are testing the replacing the main loop with a task scheduler. Just testing and ideas at this stage, but these experiments could become useful with time. All in all, there has been solid measurable progress, but the game isn’t ready yet.