My latest game is at the testers!

commence nail biting ;-)

Been programming this since mid-March, so 8 solid months. However, it's been pretty thoroughly tested and polished along the way so I'm confident that it will do well with the testers and in the BFG "lab" which they've just kitted out with a load of test machines.

Still got a bit more bling to add in and have to translate it to French, German, Spanish and Italian. (not personally, I just have to plug in all the other text and check it looks OK). Oh and the Mac version too of course. Well it compiles on Mac now but I have a few tweaks I want to make to make it ultra smooth PLUS I'm desperate for BMax 1.28 to be released which fixes a Mac gfx bug.

Going live date is set for December 6th on the front of www.bigfishgames.com, so keep an eye out for it (of *course* I'll post about it here to remind you ;-))

Well done Jake, another one "out of the door". All the best with it. :)

Good to hear Jake, I'll keep an eye out for when it goes gold ;)

Thanks guys, yeah it's only halfway out the door at the moment. Man I've been staying up till 4am to get this thing done on time. Finishing a quality game is NOT easy and not for the fainthearted.

I think Mark is having a bit of trouble with the Mac version of the 1.28 update - probably reason why the 'week' is taking much longer.

Congrats. When are you allowed to say what the game's about etc.?

I guess that's to do with the Leopard compiles not working on Tiger. I REALLY hope he can sort it in like the next 3 weeks...

Big10p: Thanks! Still not allowed to say until it's released I guess, although there's no chance of someone copying it in 3 weeks time haha. Let's just say it's NOT match-3 and it's a game-type that people love and find very addictive with a novel twist and theme that will make it stand out. Plus a ton of polish. It's EXREMELY addictive, no one has had a bad word to say yet. People start by giving a quick go and then hours have passed. I hope that this means sales (and conversion rate) will be excellent. Anyway when I post about it here, some people will moan who maybe only like action games or whatever - someone always moans on this forum ;-) But I'm hoping that lots of people will appreciate the work that's gone into it even if it's not their type of game - but I urge them to try it anyway.

I'm even more intrigued, now. :)

I'll certainly try the demo when it's released, as long as it'll run on my wooden computer. :(

I really hope that it'll run on some 98 PC. I'm sorting out the sound so that should be OK. I've also coded it to minimise VRAM use so it should be OK on 32MB cards. How much RAM do you have? It may not run at the full framerate. If you get a chance try it on a non-wooden PC to see it at it's lush smoothness glory.

I WISH I could post some screenies, but that'll have to wait...Oh OK here's a teaser from the animated intro (hope they don't fire me, shhh):

8 months to do a duck shoot clone? ;)

Good luck with the game Jake, hope it does well for you.

Yeah, I have 32 meg VRAM. :P

I like the graphics style.

Qube: haha, it's not a duck shoot clone ;-) That's just the intro to set the tone, but I know you knew that.

Big10p: Yeah the graphics style is great, very cartoony. the artist is excellent. He also does stuff for Disney and has done animations for Nickledeon before.

Looks promising. Good luck, Jake !! Now you can work on your platform game... ;-)

You rang? :p

Good luck Grey. I'm sure you'll do just fine.

For some reason, I'm getting the feeling this game has a Peggle flair to it.

kragoth74: Just been talking to an artist friend about that. It's still on the cards (but as a hobby). Some kinda freeware retro pixel art platformer. Then reuse the engine for a commercial project.

haha good one :-)

Funny you should say that but the designer wanted me to play that game to get a feel for the level of quality that they wanted and I really enjoyed it too.

Good luck with it - I'm glad to hear that it's not a match 3;) What are the black things in the picture btw?

Stevie G: thanks! Those black things are animated birds. It's pretty obvious when they are moving and you hear the sound effects. Hey, I reckon if I made another match three it would be totally awesome by now, with all my current skills ;-)

I like the style.

...and your artist's! :-p

Agreed, artists REALLY help make a game (but they sometimes need a lot of direction to get things *just* right because I'm "retentive" ;-))

41.8Mb last build and I haven't added in the 8Mb of speech yet! It's gonna weigh in at 50MB. A couple of years ago everything was 5MB but nowawadays the big studio games are bigger and people associate this with value.

Lol, I imagine you're hell to work for - but the results are worth the hassles in the long run.

50Mb! Are you releasing the 32-bit colour version of Platypus? ;-)

Yeah I'm probably way too picky, but on the converse I also know what things to drop to actually make sure we can ship the game at all.

50 MB is backgrounds, animations, ambient sounds, game sounds and speech.

Looking forward to seeing your new game, Grey. :)

Thanks dude. It's 5am, time for bed!

What genre is your game? The hottest games seem to "search and find", etc. ;)