We are pleased to announce that the very groovy chaps over at HyperDuck music studios are producing the official soundtrack for Zero Gear. Their bouncing, pounding, surging and chirping tunes will be assisting you in your physical mischief in game. Here is a sample from their work, Zero Gear’s main menu track:

Zero Gear OST Sample

Make sure you stay tuned for a very big update tomorrow, you are not going to want to miss it if you have been following the game and yearning for a chance to play!

“A project is complete when it starts working for you, rather than you working for it.” - Scott Allen

Spending a day in Dillon Beach was a nice reward for the past 3 weeks of hard work and a couple full days of driving to San Diego and back to SF.

The game has progressed greatly the past few weeks. Caffeine is a hell of a drug. The start of last week was about getting a new build out. I worked on polishing the server browser by displaying map name and player counts as well as filtering out servers running an older version. I also smoothed out weapon spawning a bit and fixed random other bugs.

The end of last week was spent tracking down some excessive network lag related to servers with high ping and high packet loss. We found the source of the lag on Friday so I will continue efforts to fix it this week. I am also planning on fixing a bug where the windows timer loses precision when a computer is left running for too long. Timing in windows is not fun!

My tasks last week involved drinking coffee, and then drinking more coffee! Between drinking coffee, I managed to make the usual pruning, prodding and polishing efforts to the build. I also spent a good chunk of time getting some delicious music into the game, from some very cool cats that we will reveal in a future post! I have also been very busy making sure everything is in place to simultaneously open our beta sign-up, and unveil our new game trailer. I have been writing up a short little casual press release as well that I am planning to send out to lots of people in order to try and generate more interest in Zero Gear. It’s just about time for us to come out of the shadows and start pushing this awesome game we have been working on for over 2 years!!!

This week, I am hoping to be very busy mailing out press releases and managing the signups for our beta.

More usability improvements and bug fixes last week, we’re getting so close to a bigger beta release I can taste it! More subtle race bot improvements, they’re going to surprise you with when they use their items and you can now see what items people have in spectator mode. Luv bots will no longer latch onto their owners, and tweaks to the Sea Mine make it a little more dangerous! We’ve also added some more visual indications of the quality of your network connection to make it more obvious to people when they are playing on a poor server connection. The bottom corner of the screen is now home to a “signal bars” icon showing a graphical representation of your ping, and ping values in the player roster are now colored from green to red.

Last week’s SVN log:

“Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does, what one feels, and what one achieves.” - Jawaharlal Nehru

In the hectic switch over to the new networking layer, I missed one small detail. Every packet of data sent wasn’t being cleaned up properly. 100 bytes isn’t that much data alone but at a rate of about 30 times a second for many seconds, it adds up. Hey, at least it was caught now and not 3 weeks after release, give me some credit for that…

Another victory was finally figuring out what was causing the game to crash on about 10% of player’s computers due to a shadow setting some graphic drivers on some NVidia 6 and 7 series cards didn’t approve of. Many other bugs were fixed last week, more than I thought now that I look at the changes, nice!

This is a big week. Lots to do, little time, lots of pressure, little beef jerky left.

Last week I spent a lot of time reproducing bugs, and trying to help figure out how to fix them. I also spent a day tuning the kart physics, and by adding a point on the bottom of the karts and tweaking a few suspension values was able to pretty much eliminate an annoying tendency the karts used to have of spinning around 180 degrees on hard landings. I also conjured up some new screenshots to put on our media page, and started cataloging some possible Zero Gear achievements and icon designs.

This week I will be doing everything I can to facilitate getting another build out, and hopefully along with it - opening up the beta further.

Last week I fixed around 1,000,000 bugs in Zero Gear, give or take a few. These included dead bots, over-active bots, sounds not playing, sounds still playing, GUI bugs, weapon bugs, spawn point bugs, camera bugs and more. We massaged more things like soccer ball mass, bunny hopping, and kart physics. I also added an entirely new weapon to the game, the Spring! With this weapon you can spring forward to gain on a rival, avoid obstacles, or make a shortcut. You can also “drop” use the weapon to spring straight up (especially useful in tag when someone is barreling towards you).

Last week’s SVN log:

“-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:

I’m proud to unveil App Classics, a new website cataloging the best all-time applications available for iPhone and iPod Touch. Intended as a resource to new owners and veteran users alike, visitors can browse shelves full of the highest rated and most popular apps in the history of the App Store. Behind the scenes, App Classics analyzes iTunes rating information to filter out and grade the truly classic apps. Each app is showcased with a screenshot, description, and video.

While some great apps get exposure through iTunes for a week or two after their launch, App Classics showcases quality apps that have withstood the test of time. To celebrate the launch of App Classics, we are taking the unprecedented step of offering up all six of our Apple featured paid games for free on Friday, October 9th!