Has it really been two weeks since the last beta release of Tidalis? That's absolutely forever in Arcen terms. Part of it was that Keith and I were busy getting AI War settled down so that we could spend the rest of the month focusing on Tidalis. But, part of it was also that there was just a ton of stuff going on with Tidalis behind the scenes, too.
In no particular order, a bunch of changes in this version:
* The last two themes are now complete, in terms of art and music, and work on the art polishing is seriously underway (check out the animations on the title screen -- still in progress -- as well as the completed ones on the volcano and tidal wreckage themes, among others, as well as all the changes to the map screen).
* Tons of new sound effects, mainly for special blocks and items.
* A bunch of new levels and cutscenes, as well as a revamp of all the existing cutscenes with new polish and code that allows us to make a much more interactive, fluid effect to them.
* The basic implementations of high scoreboards, achievements, "plushies," extrinsic item awards, and "puzzle titles" (the last two being specific to the adventure mode, the former two being global).
* A bunch of progress on the networking, including connectivity between at least Intel Macs and PCs (if anyone can verify that a PowerPC Mac can connect to an Intel Mac or a PC, that would be much appreciated -- we don't have a PPC Mac on hand, all of ours are Intel Macs). Granted, you can't actually play the game yet with the networking, but a surprising amount of work went into just getting it to this stage.
* A ton of tweaks and bugfixes.
As I noted above, we're pretty much settled on the AI War stuff for the month, bugfixes and other small tweaks aside, so we've now got the full programming firepower on Tidalis to finish this up in time for an official release hopefully on or around July 6th (that's a super tentative date, we haven't spoken to our partners about it yet -- but July 6th would be the earliest date we're likely to do it, and a week or two after that would be about the latest we'd be likely to do it).
We'll be submitting Tidalis to the PAX 10 contest this year, and we feel like it has an excellent chance; especially with all the polish in 0.800, and which we'll be putting into the game throughout this week, it's really coming to the next level presentation-wise. We'll be submitting to the contest on Friday (due date is not until next Tuesday, but we want to submit early just in case of any issues with the submission).
So this week will be even more focused on polish than usual, but I also hope to get the networking a lot closer to done this week, if not completely done (it just depends on how much other polish work requires my attention more urgently before PAX 10, since networking isn't something we expect to be evaluated for that contest).
In terms of themes, special blocks, items, and game modes, we're pretty much finished with that. We might add a last few more of some of those if time permits, but Tidalis already has an absolute ton of functionality and our focus now is on making all of it shine, along with adding or polishing the rest of the non-direct-gameplay functionality such as (for example) networking, Steamworks support, gamepad support, hopefully Twitter integration (hey, it's quick and fun -- and a good way for folks to spread the word), and various other good stuff along those lines.
We still have a goodly number more levels to create, and many more cutscenes to write and script as well, but all that's coming along well. In terms of art, we're almost purely on to the polish phase (images for the final cutscene of the game notwithstanding), and with music/sound we're pretty much done (any other sound effects we think of, and the music for the final cutscene of the game, notwithstanding). When it comes to music/sound, mostly Pablo is getting ahead on the next two projects, i.e. Children of Neinzul and the AI War 4.0 remastered soundtrack, but he'll be back on Tidalis stuff as needed. But expect to see continual evolutions on the art from Phil, it's really amazing what he's done on a lot of the themes and on the world map already, but he's just barely gotten started in many senses; so many more themes to update, and I'm working on programming some new tools to help him add even more life and vibrancy to the backgrounds.
All in all? This project is really coming together, which is really rewarding. It's nice to have this last month for a lot of polish along with the last feature implementations, as that really lets us put a level of professionalism on this game that AI War didn't hit until version 2.0 or 3.0. Of course, prior to 2.0, it was just me on AI War (and Pablo on music), but on this game we have a team of 5, so that's much better! I think everyone on the team is really amazed at how well this is all coming together from all angles, and we all have the feeling that we've got something really special here. That's a really neat feeling, I have to say.
