So today was a good day!  Nathan and Zack gave the rest of us the okay to do some five player multiplayer buildin'.  Turned out great, and is at the very least very reassuring that the game is in playable state, and with the sound knowledge that the MP engine code rests on a solid foundation.

We've got some stupid (literally) bugs to fix (such as shrinking of entities not using the same netcode as expanding of entities, Nathan has no idea how that happened!), but we're feeling pretty optimistic after Micah Gabe and I spent a whole day building ships together. 

Things are definitely looking up, although we will need to test it atleast throughout the week before we can be confident about the code's condition.

To iterate:
This update on BR's progress is not meant to hype, but merely inform.  For all intent and purposes, <sarc> consider the IRC Build to be 'next year' </sarc> and you'll be pleasantly surprised by how many days we miss that deadline by (take that either way). 

Discuss here in the forums!

 

Yesterday we released the video (two years to day the we started BR no less!) on how the upcoming Powerlines system will work!

This is one of the many systems (see Angular Destruction) we get to focus this year now with the proper multiplayer foundation going into place and the ship systems having our undivided attention.

NOTE that before any of the new ship systems are integrated, we'll be releasing our upcoming Sandbox update that rebuilds BR's foundation from the ground-up for multiplayer.

If you've got any questions on power lines that were not answered by the video, fire away in the forums and we'll answer what we can!

- Aaron

Tomorrow marks the 2 year anniversary of the first build of Blockade Runner (before the W2 release), and to celebrate we decided to release the video of the Powerline systems on the same day!

Check back tomorrow around 12:00pm EST (officially scheduled by YouTube) to see the new video, and in the meantime here's a lovely sneak peek on Vine for your viewing pleasure:

I've stepped up the Twitter postings and feedback since January, becoming acclimated to the daily postings and keeping everyone apprised of the regular progress on the game.  Working on the all-new Multiplayer Sandbox overhaul every day (including the weekends), and outputting daily news tidbits without having to write lengthy and time consuming blog posts really helps keep our focus where it belongs: nailing milestones so BR returns to the bi-weekly release schedule.

To remedy the blog/e-mail/forum lack of news updates, I'll make an effort to summarize interesting points made during the week on Twitter.  These will be in the order I get to them -not in sequence-, so if you're already following the Twitter this info may appear largely redundant!

You can also visit the front-page of the website now to see the latest Twitter posts, so if you want day-to-day progress, that's the place to be!

(read more below)

After a long hiatus on videos, we demonstrate one of the systems we're focusing on this year now that the ship systems have our undivided attention (see the Battle Plan article), as well as explain a bit of the reasoning behind the months of work we've put into plating, angles, and prefabs.

Next video on the list is a visualization of the power-line systems, so stay tuned and keep an eye out for the next major update to Blockade Runner!

To reiterate: Portions of this video are visualizations, and are not in-game footage.

Closing Comments

Hopefully the video shows a little bit of the background work we've been putting into Blockade Runner, and that there is a goal in mind with the features Nathan's spent the spent the majority of his time on!

Also, I'd like to make a mention towards the N64 styling. Since we're aiming for a sandbox style for the greater portion of this year, we've reconsidered our low-poly limit and will be maintaining the higher poly count ala the Rock Monkey.

Aaaaand, quick update on the multiplayer update since I haven't caught up with the tweets on the main page yet:

It's progressing very well considering it's complexity (6DOF multiplayer team building/destroying with 100% sync is no pickle), but there's still very obvious bugs that'd prevent gameplay. We need to ask for some continued patience while we iron these out.

---

As always, we all thank you for your support!  If you have any questions or concerns, give us a holler!

ONLINE CHAT ^{(9am to 5pm EST)}| TWITTER | NEWSLETTER

- Aaron

As I mentioned the other day, the Twitter feed is the place to go right now for inside information on BR.  So if you're not following us on Twitter, then you're probably missing out on some goodies regarding BR's development, such as these tweets from January 14th!

Tweets on January 14th

@ZanMgt good to hear we are starting to get close to the update! are you guys still adding in building and mining with it?or decided to not?

@danielw18586304 After much deliberation over the holidays, we decided on a plan that puts our full efforts towards the 'living' starships.

@danielw18586304 The plan is for 6 months, at which point we'll reevaluate whether it's time to bring in the mining/crafting/looting portions

@danielw18586304 Ultimately this means faster focused updates and a solid plan on upcoming features! =D

Tweets on January 9th

@ZanMgt WHOAH, you guys are from Michigan? I just read your bio! I live near Grand Rapids! You guys just keep getting cooler and cooler.

@Toobatee Hahah yeah, we've found that many Michiganders seem to think alike and so we bump into fans from MI somewhat often. =)

@Toobatee Great to have another Michigander on board!

The Gist of the Battle Plan

In regards to the six month plan, the gists are:

• Any sort of adventure mechanics (items, mining) are on a six-month+ hold, while 'living starships' (power systems, oxygen, weapons, etc) become the priority after this next major release and we return to the regular bi-weekly updates.
  
  
• The all new multiplayer sandbox will provide an easy and reliable collaborative building environment (including the use of adv. editor's tools in multiplayer) closer to W28, as well as the ability to quickly switch between 'builder' and 'avatar' so you can perform crew battle simulations test out your ship, etc.
  
  
• With Zack working with Nathan full-time, an emphasis will be made on cleaning up the past 90-something weeks of code and to make a transition from XNA to DirectX, vastly improving the game's visuals and performance.  Our goal being a solid, stable product you'd tell your friends about, by this six month development cycle or the next.

To reiterate in the event of confusion (of which I am prone to cause):

Items/mining/adventuring are not out of the overall game plan nor will they be bottlenecked out of possibility, the code is merely on standby until certain milestones are hit. We simply decided focused and concise development targets to reduce 'moving parts' was in order so we could put our full attention on the meat and potatoes of Blockade Runner.

Closing Comments

More tweets from a week or so ago will be on the way until I've got the main page caught up with the day's tweets.

As always, we all thank you for your support!  If you have any questions or concerns, give us a holler!

ONLINE CHAT ^{(9am to 5pm EST)}| TWITTER | NEWSLETTER

- Aaron

 

I've taken on some of the simpler ends of code for BR to help Gabe out with the cleanup, so to spare me some time Twitter has become quite handy for putting out quick updates on all things BR.

A fan of Twitter I am not, however with Tweetdeck I'm finding it much easier and timely to make quick updates, so if you want to follow BR more closer, follow the Twitter feed please!

For those who'd rather not deal with Twitter, I'll try and update the news page here with conversations that occured and maybe expand on an interesting subject that comes up -- and, In the interest of completeness, it'll start from Jan 7th and be cherry-picked its way to today!

Post-Flu 

The first Monday morning back at the office for everyone post-flu!

We've still got some post-influenza symptoms that'll we're told will last another week or so now, but all-in-all everyone's feeling a world's better and managed to get some good progress in!

New Video This Week

We're looking at probably (nothing solid) around Thursday/Friday for the new video, so you might want to subscribe to the YouTube channel or sign up for the newsletter to know the instant it's up!

Update On The Update

• Very stable and strong re-build of the network engine has been the emphasis since W71 when Zack came to join us as the game's second core engine coder (Nathan alone had done everything before engine related before then).

• We're in the "put everything back together" phase; the game has otherwise been virtually unplayable since W71 hence lack of visually descriptive news updates on the game itself.

• Weeks, not months for the next update, to follow finally with a return to the bi-weeklyish updates we all know and love!

• Over 100 improvements on the changelog, mostly bug fixes and general improvements.

• During the holidays with Zack now a full-time engine coder we did some reflection and battle planning for the upcoming year.  Some decisions have been made for a 6-month battle plan that we'll have to go into deeper details with in a separate communiqué.

Closing Comments

Hit us up on the web chat IRC if you have any questions regarding the update and the battle plan!  We're available from 9:00AM EST to 5:00PM EST, and mostly only Alaric bites.

As always, thank you all for your support!

- Aaron

From all of us at ZanMgt, we welcome Blockade Runner into 2013!

We're all still recovering from a nasty flu virus we got after Christmas that knocked us out for a week.  Development's picking back up again, slowly but steadily as everyone returns to their rhythms.

A couple of quick updates:

• Micah nearly has an epically cool new example video ready to go (we'd planned for it to be ready by New Years, but oi with that).
• The new multiplayer engine is coming together!  No firm estimate on the update, but the major unknowns have been resolved!

We're really excited about the new plan for the year and can't wait to share it with everyone!  Stay tuned!

Thanks to your votes, Blockade Runner made the Top 100 for IndieDB's "Indie of the Year"! We are all deeply grateful, and in celebration present you with this little treat of the Starman mining with a proper instrument!


Enjoy, and thank you!