Turns out when you’re writing a renderer for a game, and the renderer isn’t finished, it’s hard to come up with really awesome stuff to show people about the game you’re making. This is essentially what we’re waiting on before we blow the lid off of everything on Project Odin. We want to be in a position where we can show you what we’re working on, get your feedback, ask you about things you’d like to see in the game, and answer any questions you might have.
Mr. Triolo is currently contemplating how one might animate a chicken
There is a lot of concept art floating around on our repos that we’re trying to use to give you guys an idea of the fact that a lot of work is being done right now, not just in art but in the code as well. We’re having to do a lot of “architecture” programming before we can start putting the game together on top of it; the main reason for this is that Odin is multiplayer, and multiplayer games just work differently. We are taking the opportunity to do some optimization to ensure that the game takes advantage of all these newfangled “cores” we hear about in the computer stores these days as well. Again, if you have your toes in the programming world, you know that this can be tricky. (If you don’t but you are curious, check out this educational wikipedia article on race conditions! If you don’t like circuit theory, feel free to skip that.)
We are also taking some time to actually get organized. The game is going to take more than a year to get done (not six like the last one! maybe two though) and one of the biggest issues with making a thing that takes as long as games do is that it’s difficult to keep all the important stuff in your head when you haven’t thought about it in a while. We were guilty of a lot of this on our first (failed) project, and we were guilty of more of it on Dredmor. I’m sure it will happen for Odin as well, but my job over the last two weeks has been getting us set up with a way of managing our project stuff so that we can be as organized as possible with as little effort as possible. (For those of you who are interested, we’re using Atlassian, and it seems pretty awesome so far.) I’m also starting to understand why so many indies make all their games, start to finish, in a month.
Coming soon: some Dredmor news pertaining to toys, the Steam Workshop, and some new content!
A potential terrain style that we have since scrapped for technical reasons (orange didn't test well)
