Time for a status report as I haven’t written anything for a while now.
As I wrote in the last post I took a week off, focusing entirely on Ripple.

During that time I managed to tweak the performance, so that the game runs with a pretty sweet framerate even on my old netbook.
I made the levelselect-screen (inspired by Super Mario World, but with a much more sinister atmosphere), and most of the menu screens.
Oh yeah, and the game has an ending now. And its a really epic ending as well =D

So whats left?
Actually not much.

I am currently working on a tool that optimizes and compresses all the level data. The raw textual level data (images and sounds not included) is about 500 mb per level, but there is a lot of data that isn’t used and should be removed.
When this is done I need to write a new routine for loading those new compressed levels. I’ll need to add a preloader to the game, I need to finalize the last menu screen where you’ll be able to re-map the controls (functionality already in place, only needs gui) and I need to implement some mochi-stuff.

Except for this, we need to do some balancing in the levels, and probably go over the behavior for some of the enemies.

So, when will we release the game?
Don’t know. I’ve been working on the game for about an hour every day the last two weeks, and I think I will be able to spend a lot of time during the summer. Would be sweet if we had a release candidate by this autumn, but no promises.
The best way to keep up is to keep an eye at this blog (even though we’re pretty bad at updating it, sorry ’bout that).

/Tommislav