“A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” — Shigeru Miyamoto.

An approximate list of things that have been done in the past week:

• The bolt dispenser is in, and works. Previously, you’d just get free bolts. Now you have to pay for them. Buy Bolts, or the Bolt Council will put a Bolt in your Head.
• The tutorial has been rewritten in order to a) cover all the new features, b) be obnoxious. “You probably shouldn’t go near that glowing anvil over there. It looks like it might explode at any moment, and it almost certainly wouldn’t help you on your quest.” Interestingly enough, it wasn’t clear during playtesting that the tutorial was a tutorial;  instead, everybody just thought that it was an enormous, glowing icon.
• Massive dumps of new art from David, who is still continuing, desperately, to try and finish all of the skill art.
• A new title screen (from David).
• Some fixes to the achievement screen.
• New title music from Matthew.
• You can now enter doorframes, or other hard to access locations, by holding down SHIFT and clicking. (This doesn’t work on David’s keyboard, and I have to track that one down yet.)
• Automatic crash bug dumping! Why didn’t I do this years ago? For everything? I don’t know. Anyhow, if the game crashes you can now send us a dump file and we can actually parse it. Microsoft does something good for once.
• Various new spell effects, including the support code for Midas’s Touch, the Blazing Nova, and various melee-flavoured skills.
• Levelling up works again. Skill selection works.
• Every single skill tree now has some sort of entry in the skill database, most of which have some kind of art and many of which do various things. This is thanks to the heroic XML-slaying effort of Daniel, who spent today moving houses so that he could get away from us. It won’t work, though. We sent Death Bees after him.
• An entirely new, all redesigned skill book. This is the third all new, entirely redesigned skill book, and we have now iterated its design to Valve-like levels of brilliance.
• Derek assures me you will be able to buy the game shortly. He showed me a web page with various links that went to Amazon, Google Checkout, and Paypal respectively.
• You can now combine skills due to the new Skill Combining System. Simply drag “Fireball” into one skill slot, “Root” into the other, and suddenly you can cover the entire dungeon with flaming plant life. It’s pretty funky. It also crashes occasionally, which is why you can’t combine just *any* skill…
• An experience bar now tells you how much experience you gained.
• Speaking of flaming plant life, monsters can now catch on fire.
• “Trap shhtung.” I don’t even know what this is, but apparently I did it.
• And more stuff that I haven’t been paying attention to.

We have gone from SVN revision 2,444 (David, Monday May 10th, “exp bar highlight versions and tileset polish”) to revision 2,544 (Nicholas, Sunday May 16th, “Tutorial Fies”) in the space of a week. The game is looking much, MUCH healthier than I have seen it looking in a very long time. You can play, things happen, they are good things and they are fun. I am pleased.

That said, we’re still not quite at our beta release date target (the 15th.) This is mainly the fault of the massive amount of work that still needs to be poured into the skills system.  Our Mantis bugtracking system claims that I have four tasks to do before beta, David has three, and Citizen Daniel has fifteen. I’m probably going to start chipping away at some of CD’s tasks soon enough, as some of them are things I put on his plate when I was overloaded with stuff to do. Now the tables have turned on me. With that in mind, I’m going to go back to work. I have coffee, Coca-cola (which I only ever drink in crunch mode these days), and a girlfriend in the back of the apartment playing Rune Factory Frontier (work that yogurt maker, honey! work it good!) and asking me every fifteen minutes if I want soup or not.

Now where’s that @#$@ing Rhapsody CD gone?