End of Week 21

I've had a really busy week so far.  Next week is going to be even more hectic.  First, let's talk about the project.  So I've added a few more artists to the team this week and one more programmer.  First time this has ever happened, but I met with a guy that decided not to sign our NDA.  He wanted me to give him access to all our game design information before he would decide to join the project or not.  Obviously, I'm not going to do that.  Maybe he's just one of those people that's spooked about signing things.  I've signed quite a few NDAs, so it doesn't phase me.  But maybe it's for the best.

So I'm going to start bringing in printed out design document stuff in to the programmer meetings so we can all look at things and discuss them.  I've laid out the numbers and formulas on how our strange combat system will work.  It's going to need a lot of testing and rebalancing.  I think our combat system is going to really throw people off at first.  We give people far more freedom than any fighting game has ever given a player, but I know players are going to die a lot until they get used to it.  It's not arcade skill based.  It's more fast paced strategy based.  So more thinking and less button twitching.  You will not be able to casually hit buttons while watching tv like you can in every other MMO on the planet.  There's not a name for Dawnshine combat, because it doesn't exist yet, so it's hard to describe without laying it all out.  But maybe we can start doing that a year from now when we might have game play footage to go with it.

I completely redesigned one of the classes: the Neg Wath Necromancers.  They do summon zombies, but they're not exactly a pet class.  They're closer to Elemental Shamans from WoW, only with death magic instead of natural.  They have a lot more interactions with their zombies than WoW shamans have with their totems, but it's otherwise the closest in similarities.

We might be close to having the combat system working in the engine, which would mean we'd be able to start alpha testing soon.  We'll fix the most obvious things first, then start letting our friends test.  We have a huge number of people wanting to test, so that will come in helpful.

Aside from that, I'm going to be at E3 all next week with Loki's Planet.  I've got some pretty big interviews booked.  I'll admit, I'm not very familiar with console games, so I'll be interviewing developers that make games I've never played.  That has me a little nervous.  When I'm not doing that, I'll be hanging out at our booth interviewing people on camera.  I've interviewed bands before, but not on camera.  So this will be the first time I've ever interviewed game developers.