February 17 (Prep Work)

As of about an hour ago we're now T minus 1 day and counting until the InstantAction Developer's Contest deadline is here. I've spent the last week really buckling down and getting things ready to go. As a result, there's been quite a few important developments over the last few days. Here's the rundown of what's been happening:

With the IA deadline looming just around the corner, I realized I still had a ton of work to do to actually get a release build ready. Sure, the game works on my system but actually packaging things into a nice, lean-and-clean release entails a bit more than simply zipping and uploading. It's a bit of an interesting situation because essentially I'm taking a game that's very much in development and packaging it as if it were finished. On the plus side, it's a good way of doing trial runs so I have a better idea of what it takes to get a public beta ready to download.

First on the agenda: writing a quick help/manual for the game with an emphasis on "quick." Ideally, the manual had to cover movement, combat, powerups and objectives in about a page (images included). No simple task. A couple of issues cropped up right at the start like what format to chose? A simple .txt or .doc file is certainly the most compatible but not necessarily the most interesting and PDF is nice but requires a downloadable reader. In the end, I chose to do a simple (W3C valid!) HTML help page. It's compatible, allows for some rich formatting, doesn't require another download and it gave me an opportunity to brush up on my HTML and CSS which should prove useful for the upcoming Bit Battles website. I'm not sure if I'll end up packaging it with the final release build but it's a nice starting point for a proper manual.

With the quick help done, it was time to do some housekeeping. I finally got around to cleaning up the data directory and got rid of a few megs worth of obsolete textures, interiors, shapes, script and GUI files. It's amazing how much "stuff" had accumulated in a year. My head on desk moment of the day: finding a subdirectory that contained all of the old hazard zone data (about two megs worth) which had been obsolete for months. D'oh!

Afterwards, it was on to usability issues and bug fixes. First up, dedicated servers. I'm not sure how much use it will be getting this release. Nevertheless, getting a dedicated version of the Bit Battles server up and running took all of five minutes. I wrote a quick batch script to spawn a dedicated server and respawn it should they crash although here's hoping there's no need to make use of that feature! As for bugs, I'm still in the process of testing but so far so good. What I've found thus far has been minor clientside issues (GUIs not saving preferences, etc.).

Thanks to the frantic scramble to get Bit Battles contest-ready, I've had to come to grips with the fact that time is really running out. The MyDreamRPG contest ends in April but because player feedback plays such an important role in the judging, March is really "go time." The goal right now is to have a public beta out by March 1 because I need an entire month to conduct open testing, receive player feedback and implement suggestions. What this all boils down to is there's no more time for new content; what's done still needs to be polished and the rest of the time will be spent advertising and handling all of the little things that go into getting a public beta going.

With this in mind, I've decided to cut Access Denied. With the map still very much in the planning stage and me still stuck in a mapping rut, there was never any hope for it. The downside is only having five maps (well, ten if you count having two versions of the same map for each gametype) for release. On the plus side, Access Denied was probably the single most time consuming task left on my todo list. With it gone, that's more time to test, polish and advertise. It's a good trade-off.

In other news, the marketing campaign is underway. The Fanatical Games website got a nice update (all new screenshots of Bit Battles), there's now a GGE page devoted to the game and Phil Jones of Tank Universal fame (great indie game, go buy it!) was kind of enough to link the game from his front page (and I've linked his website, see the Fanatical Games "Links" section). There's more in the works and even more that needs to be done but it's a nice start.

Well, that's all for me. By the next update the IA contest will be over and it'll be time for beta signups! Scaaaarrry.