Hello dear readers and thank you for turning in.
We are very glad to announce that we are back from oblivion and right on schedule, working hard to bring you a playable (and actually fun) alpha version of Loot It!
A lot has happened since we disappeared. Generally, lots of things related to the project which all have lead us here today.
First things first I want to apologize for our absence as it clearly wasn't intended. After our New Year's Eve crunch in 2011 we ran into mayor performance issues, because our code was super bad and generally more suitable as toilet paper than as actual code.
So we decided to rewrite the game, which we actually started in February.
As I am a student most of the time I didn't have much time for the project and so our progress was very slow. Also I didn't have much time to create art assets either, so there wasn't really anything I could show off, as always the same Art Assets definitely would get boring after a while. Actually we wanted to inform you about all of this but at first we forgot and then it became too awkward after some time so we didn't do it either...
We made some gameplay changes (some of them might be only temporary), such as that being seen by the guards leads to an immediate game over. This is because we had massive problems coding our own pathfinding system as we don't have a Unity Pro license yet. Also we removed the annoying lockpicking minigame until we have a better idea for how it should work / look like.
Also we acquired a (free) Android and iOS5 license for Unity3.5.x which enables us to bring you the game to Android (But it seems as if we have some performance issues in this case) - the touch controls are already functional but – like the rest of the game – lack some polishing.
At the moment we have a build at our hands which doesn't have the mayor bugs and performance issues the last version of the game had, but lacks any playable content (finished levels) whatsoever. This is kinda bad, because you as the player won't have any fun playing the game in one of our unfinished level prototypes. Thus we won't give you a playable alpha build yet – but beware: we're working on it.
For the contents of the named build:
- One or two playable mission- maps (tutorial map included)
- Showcasing basic gameplay and MAYBE also some events / NPC interactions
- Lots of general improvements
- A few little surprises
- A few new graphical assets
I guess that doesn't sound like very much but the new game runs a lot better than the old one and we put lots of effort into it
One last thing I want to tell you is that Loot It! created with the Unity Free license will also be available for free, downloadable from somewhere around here, maybe also on Desura. Should we ever get our hands on Unity PRO however, we might produce a commercial version of the game with some of the features we removed and some other fancy Stuff Unity Pro lets us do- and definitely some massive Performance and Graphic Improvements (realtime shadows, pathfinding etc.)
That's it for now, I hope you like what you just read and are not too mad on us for vanishing for about 8 months. Have a nice day!
If you have any questions, comments or critiques you can of course always write a comment or tweet me (@Salynrad) and I'll try to answer as soon as I can!
