“-You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
-What mood is that?
-Last-minute panic.”
-Calvin & Hobbes
Check out this cool Zero Gear poster we got for motivation!
We all got a lot done last week. The most significant task being updating the Steam build. Another big task was getting bots working again. They weren’t working ever since we switched the networking layer. I wrote some code that bypasses the networking layer and forces the bot to directly communicate with the server. This isn’t ideal as there is now a whole other code path but I believe the best solution was chosen based on all the many factors.
Now we are working on adding the last remaining features and squashing as many bugs as we can before the end of the month. Things are moving along. If you are interested in following our progress we just opened our tracker to the public for viewing: Zero Gear Tracker (we also have a twitter feed here)
I have been tweaking lots of little things in the game, tuning a few map details, tweaking the kart behaviors, camera and guis. The additional tester feedback from getting the build back on steam this week has been great for shining a spotlight on little things that we can tweak and tune to make the entire game experience just a little better / smoother. I have finished our new Zero Gear trailer with the help of Tapio Liukkonen, and hope to release it along with the public opening of the beta, which should happen in the coming weeks.
This week I will continue tweaking and tuning as well as helping manage tester feedback and bug reporting and try to keep us on track.
Last week I fixed a lot of bugs reported by our wonderful beta testers, mainly GUI and small gameplay issues. New stuff added includes an instructional loading screen for the first few times playing the game and support for dynamically changing the map rotation and other server settings when in-game.
This week will be more about fixing bugs than adding any new features as we get closer to a public beta.
Last week’s SVN log:
Am I seeing a double-bladed knife near the poster?
Really shows off Zero Gear, with a good variety of the customization, and something about it just says “action packed”, which from what i’ve seen, is something Zero Gear definitely is.
Speaking of the poster, it’s great!
Can’t wait for the open beta, keep up the great work!
We have to defend our code. The knife is just a warning. The battle axe is not pictured.