Well hello there brick wall!

(Best forum submission of an image of Rolith running headlong into a brick wall gets put here and in Monday’s design notes)

These last two weeks have been absolutely crazy. 

Last month, when discussing the upcoming Lucky Week holiday I came up with this grand idea.  We’d just finished the first ever Artix Entertainment GameTastic challenge, and I’d successfully had a couple of 48 hour game development competitions under my belt.  Basically I was feeling nigh on indestructible and a feature a day for five days seemed like a nice, challenging mountain to climb.  I’d get it done, I was invincible.

Guess what? I’m vincible.  Very vincable.

I’d (and Alina) worked 150 hours in the last two weeks before Thursday, but thanks to a large number of unexpected bugs, some technical issues, and a couple of bouts of insomnia we were way behind, and we settled in yesterday morning for a long one.  Neither of us really knew what exactly we were in for.  29 hours later, I’ve worked 27 of them.  And now, as I’m making more typos then not, it’s time to re-adjust plans for what’s going live today.

Player Created Content is a HUGE deal for us, and while we don’t want to cut corners I also don’t want to go home tonight without having released something to you guys.  Know that this release is pre-preview. What we’re going to do is release a semi-complete map layout/quest building toolkit and the ability to test it as a DA only town. 

Again, this is a pre-preview version of the content creation engine, missing many of the features we really wanted to get live, including cut scenes and saving/loading, as well as a more polished interface that’s more player friendly.