Haven’t posted any updates in a while. We were hoping to have a video showing off the levels and monsters we’ve been working on done last month but other obligations have been in the way.
Here’s a general idea of where we’re at right now development wise:

Game mechanics and general programming: Basically finished, we have a couple more things to finish up but really the programming is done except for some map specific stuff and minor fixes.

Level editor: Fully functional, just needs some polish.

Animation: Probably about 2/3rds of the animations have been made, but Katy plans to improve several of the first animations that were done for better consistency.

Levels: This is tricky, about 30% of the levels are in alpha or later stages. About 60% are sketched in some way but haven’t been made into something playable yet.

Backgrounds: Until levels have been play tested quite a bit there’s not much point in doing the backgrounds, since a major change would mean completely repainting the level. Maybe 15% finished.

All the shirts and posters have now been sent with the exception of a couple of people who we’ve already spoken with. Unfortunately we have regular jobs which makes it difficult for us to actually get to the post office to mail something, but that’s finally done.

The monster code for In The Dark has been completely overhauled to be more efficient and flexible. Mainly there are now monster “parts” so that we can separate the animations of the more complex monsters into pieces. For example, previously if we wanted to make a monster capable of running at biting at the same time it would’ve been very difficult to make look decent because the monster was all one piece. Now we can just animate the mouth and the legs separately and it looks great.

We’ve also just about finished with the last puzzle elements for the game, so most of what’s left is just monsters and levels.

Haven’t posted anything for a while so here’s whats been going on:

We’re going to be at Katsucon this weekend. Primarily for Kerry and Katy to sell artwork and the like, but we’ll have some ITD stuff for sale too.

The posters are now in! We’ll start shipping the posters, shirts, etc. next week when we get back from the con. If you’re supposed to be getting something and your address has changed in the last 6 months, now would be the time to tell us. If you happen to be at Katsucon come find us and we’ll give you your stuff.

In The Dark had a major glitch last week, and it was funny enough that I decided to upload a video of it:

Game development has been going somewhat slowly over the last 2 weeks, It’s been difficult for the three of us to coordinate our schedules. Nevertheless I think we’ll have a new video hopefully in March showing some of the new puzzle elements and monsters we’ve added to the game.

It’s been a crazy week for us. Magfest was great, maybe next year we’ll get a table to show off game demos and stuff.

Many of the bugs we were experiencing in development have disappeared  thanks to the Löve developers, without them In The Dark wouldn’t be happening. Because of this soon we’ll be able to get something playable out to all our testers, and eventually the whole game. I’m hesitant to estimate dates on anything but hopefully we’ll be giving you a finished game in a few months.

We’ve been busy visiting friends and family, but we’re getting back to work now. We keep falling behind as new things pop up, but we will finish it. We are finally going to start shipping the rewards soon. Soon some of you will get shirts, posters, and the mini posters which will look like this:They’re about 8.5 X 5.5 inches and will be signed by us. Anyone whose getting a shirt will also get one of these.

The game itself is coming along nicely, a lot of things have been reworked, most of the remaining game elements have now been implemented, so now we mostly have to concentrate on the actual levels and artwork. Maybe we’ll make another video showing some of the new stuff sometime soon.

We’ve been working on updating In The Dark to the latest version of box2D and while we’re at it are rewriting and optimizing pretty much everything a long the way.  My goal is to hit 50 average FPS on my netbook. If we can manage that then I think mobile ports will be significantly more feasible in the near future. Unfortunately this has also opened up quite a few little bugs that we have to work out, and thats eaten up most of our time over the last 2 weeks. As an example I recently wrote about how the lights for ITD are calculated. The old version was 460 lines of code, the new one is only 240. That doesn’t always mean faster, but I think most programmers will agree that “less is more”.

Sadly on rare occasions the new lighting makes mistakes.
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Development has been slow the past few weeks mostly due to our other jobs and some minor computer issues. We may be releasing a small game or two, most likely for android, before In The Dark is finished. This will help us with our funding issues, and in the long run should speed up development.

We’re also trying out a different level creation pipeline that should be a little bit quicker and hopefully result in better levels.

We finally got the Tshirts in! I was going to upload some photos of them, but it turns out glow in the dark stuff doesn’t photograph very well. We’re really happy with them, and I think everyone we’re sending them to will be too. Initially we were planning to sign them, but it doesn’t look like thats going to work very well, and that would discourage wearing them, so instead we’re going to send them with a signed print. We still have to get something printed up, but hopefully we’ll be able to get them shipped by the end of the month. We also have a few extra shirts, which we’ll be selling at future conventions and possibly online for anyone still interested in one.

We were trying to get a short demo ready for IGF this year but we didn’t make the deadline. Rather than let the effort go to waste, we are going to use it as a sort of alpha for our beta testers.

We are currently trying to get it ready (better controller support, data logging of a few things, more Mac / Linux testing, a boss monster which you’ll have to wait to see in action) but hopefully we’ll be able to send that out in a few weeks. After we get feedback and make any needed changes we’ll see about releasing it publicly.

I see that people seemed to like my write up on Bump’s footing detection, so I’ll write more posts like that in the future. I’m sure some of you might be interested in how the level editor or the lights actually work.

In other news we are in the process of ordering the shirts and posters. Because they are small bulk orders they may take a little while to get to us. Thanks again everybody! and don’t forget that you can still preorder or donate! Every dollar allows us to spend more time working on In The Dark.

We raised over $2500! We will be ordering the shirts and posters as soon as we get some people’s sizing information and verify some addresses. We will continue to accept PayPal for a little while with all the other rewards, but the shirts will no longer be available after we’ve placed the order for them.
In other news, we’re working on getting a demo ready for beta testers and IGF, our schedules allowing. We’ll post more news as it happens.

Thanks again everybody!

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted an update.

We’re working hard on In The Dark but are still short on funds so progress has been slower than we would like.

The past week has mostly gone into getting the map editor to be more usable, with features like copy / paste, undo, and recovery of maps from close / crash without saving.

In other news, only 2 days left if you want to support us through Paypal , thanks to everyone who has already preordered, we couldn’t do this without you!