Paint me a picture news

Another week gone by and I'm starting to forge relationships with other indie developers which is something I didn't expect. In fact the support from the community has been very good in general in particular the Nexus 2 Facebook page. I've never been much of a social media person but I believe in my idea and a man on this sort of mission needs the input of others to succeed. That part is somewhat difficult to digest because I am a proud man and some of the diatribe I receive is unwarranted, one guy looked at an early development video and decided he didn't like it, how you can assess a house from a pile of bricks I'll never know but its something I'll have to get used to.

One thing I am now extremely happy with is the state of the art (a good book by the way,) I mentioned before I have a tale to tell and potent imagery and atmospheric music will be key. Some of these stills look like oil paintings; achieving that effect was a somewhat heavy process of tweaking and refining perhaps done a little early but as well as encouraging you to join this quest, it further spurs my creativity. Originally I wanted to go for very stark space-sim imagery with the high glare from the sun, but it soon became apparent that it isn't conducive to good story telling. I must nod to Mathias currently working on Deep Space Settlement for some advice and strongly advise you to checkout that project, that man's artwork alone is something to behold.

The basic mechanics are very nearly there now, movement way points are now showcased in my latest video and each ship is able to assign a practically infinite number of movement steps, something which will be very useful when drawing up patrol routes and flaking manoeuvres and essential to basic fleet strategy. Much more work to be done on that, testing and fixing the bugs as necessary. More work on short-cuts are made available in launching and dealing with fighters and all of the UI elements gel together much better in general.

I'm starting to hear your voices and you're coming out of the shadows now prodding and poking, inspecting the potential merchandise. The utterings of our collective are starting to form and it's both scary and exciting at the same time, a lot of you are talking of alpha's and testing but I'm not there yet. I'm a stickler for bugs, the code is getting complicated now and its easier to not let the errors creep in at all than to fix them further down the line.

Space is still pretty empty, it won't stay that way for long. I have to work out some fairly complex technical problems such as dogfighting and the interactions of the frigates (in hand though I assure you.) I think soon we'll start to see the odd space station appear, and civilian ships doing the rounds moving between stations, so don't get used to that void because the game will live up to its name soon enough.

Yogev my musician is enjoying his honeymoon break, as I catch wind of more and more mentions I feed them over to him, one particularly cool mention caught my eye this week on The Big List of upcoming Sci-Fi space games where Yogev points out that we're on the same list as a few big titles, not something I take lightly.

I've begun to put the feelers out for voice-actors and artists, fairly soon this project well need to be crowd-sourced. Sadly I've invested almost as much as I can afford to in this project which is thankfully enough to carry it through to viability. Whether this becomes a good game or a great game rests entirely with you, I for one appreciate the poetry in that.

As always I'm grateful for the audience and hope that you enjoy reading my words as I have enjoyed assembling them. If you are hungry for more read the Shallow Space blog.

Thanks,

James