No, it's not done yet!

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 :)

But in the meantime, here's a couple of shots.



* Yes, I know, pretty much all the WSGs are unique have a look at some of the others..

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.

ok, so nearly falling back into my old ways of forgetting to post anything for ages. Possibly because I'm working hard on Airburst, but more likely because the life of a games developer isn't half as exciting as some people think!

There's also the problem of having to be careful what I actually write here. I can't give any details on release dates or game features as that makes the marketing team unhappy. Making the marketing team unhappy is never a good plan.

I could talk about technical stuff of course, except that rather a lot of it is under NDA. That and every coder I've worked with knows I'm not a spectacularly technical coder anyway ;)

The actual coding and design is progressing nicely (in a non specific not giving out any sort of timescale or feature information kind of way), I'm having fun messing with the controls. Going from the original Airburst's 3 key controls to having the 360 Controller's array of buttons was a classic temptation to completely overcomplicate things, but I've managed to hold off from forcing you to require the chatpad to have enough buttons to control everything (actually, control is much easier on the 360 controller than the old keyboard controls).

We've been experimenting with different control layouts and options too, which is always fun. Especially when the controls have to work for all the different game types and for as wide an age range as possible. Airburst Extreme's players range from 5 year olds to granddads, so I need to make sure that we're not excluding anyone.

So, we had our first testing party on Friday night. Just a few friends round to see how much they can break the game at this early stage and to try out a few new elements in it. Turns out they can break a lot, so plenty of work for me this weekend :)

Working on (amongst other things) the game selector this weekend.

To clear up some early confusion when we first mentioned we were doing Airburst for the Xbox 360, this is a completely new Airburst. We wanted to call it Airburst 360, but the lawyers pointed out we'd need to release another 357 versions of the game before we could get away with that. As a good chunk of Xbox owners won't have seen either Airburst or Airburst Extreme yet, we went with the easy option and just called it Airburst again. Mac users can think of it as Airburst 3 if they want :)

For those Xbox gamers that haven't heard about Airburst yet, it's an extreme sport played at high altitude. Each player sits on a raft of balloons and controls a bat. Razor sharp flying balls called bursters are then released and players have to defend their balloons while trying to burst their opponents to knock them out of the sky. Add in a whole bunch of powerups and different game modes, plus each character having an Extreme power to try and tilt the balance in their favour and that's Airburst in a nutshell.

For those of you that have played Airburst and/or Airburst Extreme, this version is all the best game modes from the first two (without having to play through the Story mode we added in Airburst Extreme to unlock them) with a whole new, written from scratch engine so we could tune everything for the 360 and its controllers (including a certain new controller with oversized buttons).

testing testing... is this thing on... etc.

Now we've officially 'mentioned' that we're working on Airburst for Xbox LIVE Arcade it's safe for me to do a small dev diary on the project.

With my normal blog/diary update rate that means the Airburst diary will probably have this post and another just after the game's released, but I'll try and update a little more regularly than I normally do :)