Things are starting to come together on Airburst now. Enough that we’ve been able to stick together a short teaser video of a small part of the game’s action. It’s still work in progress of course, but you get to see a couple of elements
The XBLA version of Airburst is now testing on Partnernet, the special testing network for Xbox developers. We’ve put it up so we can run some tests, but also so other friendly neighbourhood Xbox devs can have a play
It’s still under NDA and there’s plenty of work left for me to do, so don’t post screenshots or anything, but feel free to drop me a line if you spot anything that shouldn’t be there.
Oh, and one feature just for the devs as it won’t be in the final version due to the new Dashboard they showed at E3. Check out the dash when you’re in Airburst
Getting there! Still a while to go before Airburst is ready for everyone to play on their Xboxes (and even if I knew when it was likely to be released, I wouldn't be allowed to say anyway), but we've just passed an important development milestone and things are definitely taking shape. We're still working flat out to get everything finished, but hopefully should have a little bit of time to put together a bit of gameplay video and some more screenshots for everyone to have a look at.
We have however put a couple of screenshots up (www.unscripted360.com and www.360sync.com got them up first over the weekend) to show the work in progress. Hopefully more shots and stuff as we go.
In a break with games industry tradition, we put a large chunk of the sound effects in over the weekend (rather than on the last day before the game goes to testing as is normal practice). Adam actually built a bunch of the outboard gear and a synthesiser from scratch for Airburst, so there aren't very many canned samples (other than the ones where we were bashing cans together) in this game. I'm trying to persuade him to put his build diary back up on his Jaffamountain.com site so all the fans of his new hobby of messing around with Arduino boards and his somewhat unique* Weird Sound Generator build can see the latest photos
Things are progressing pretty well at the moment. Hopefully at some point we'll be allowed to show some screenshots, but until then I get to do vague blog posts about stuff without giving away any real details
I've been doing a lot of work on the network code recently with a lot of help from Martin Piper over at ReplicaNet. It's mildly brain boggling trying to persuade network packets to time travel in order to cover the inherent lag you get when communicating over the net, but so far it's working pretty well. Once you get around the problem of network packets going back in time and killing their own grandparents it's a lot easier.
We've also got another testing party coming up soon. It'll be interesting to compare the feedback from that to the initial one we had here, especially as Airburst is a bit more feature complete now.