postOpen your eyes, open your mind

By ManTis on August the 11th, 2008 under Ekaiyo project

The vacations were amazing. Since I was out of range of any mobile phone, I was offline. And it was good.

But I'm back and time to work. Preprod is more or less functional, and we're adding final stuff to it. Guess I should update the roadmap once I'm back home. Theo is working on ABE so we prolly will have ABE functionality in some form within the game engine (as opposed to console only text-based battles). Swarming AI are developed for the pokemon and I'm taking all things that others don't have time to wrap their heads around and implementing it (gaming-specific code that I have background with, and other programmers may not).

I'm in two minds about showing our current progress. The map is just a heightmap crudely textured and there are no models other than players and some pokemon. There is no real GUI, as etix mysteriously disappeared again and the console looks ugly. Ugly things tend to scare people off. The reason we're not going public with preprod is because if people see 'omg, Pokemon MMORPG!', download it and see glitchy 3D-chatroom-game they tend to go away and never look back. OTOH, it does show some progress. Also it shows that we care about you guys and that there IS some code working. I'll ask the team how they feel about it. Tell me what you think as well - do you want ugly pictures couple times a week showing off what we're currently working on or rather bunch of pictures displaying polished features once a month or so. TIA.

 comments

Tezeb said, on August the 11th, 2008:

It's great to hear about the progress, keep up with the good job!

gamefreak2kx said, on August the 11th, 2008:

I think almost everybody would opt for the ugly pictures a couple of times a week. The reason is that most people would be motivated by every ounce of energy and commitment the dev team is putting in. They would also like more frequent updates rather than waiting one whole month. The more fequent updates would also show the people that regular progress is being made, no matter how less or how large, it would greatly boost the morale of every member of the community and even newcomers. Oh and yes, you've done a great job so far. Please keep it up.Thankyou.

_Orion said, on August the 11th, 2008:

Maybe you could put the nice finished pictures in a monthly blog, and all the ugly ones could just be posted in a thread in the forum which has WIP in big letters in the title.

Ubiquinone said, on August the 11th, 2008:

I honestly don't care what I see, I just want some evidence that the game exists :D. I vote for a crude thingy right now then polished monthly updates after that.

Humain said, on August the 11th, 2008:

i would want the ugly pictures just to see whats going on. but maybe every once and awhile put up a nice one :P

Axmand said, on August the 12th, 2008:

You and your Team Mantis really working hard about the project, please never give up.

fdrtd said, on August the 12th, 2008:

when does it come out

ManTis said, on August the 12th, 2008:

when it's ready

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