[anistal]

I was very excited to see the link to Fenix Blade - Cry Havoc. But wept to see that there was no download link and nothing on the website. *sob*
When can we play it?

[Sirocco]

Not certain -- I'm extremely hesitant to give out any details regarding release dates (even theoretical ones) since Real Life(tm) tends to get in the way, and I travel frequently thanks to my weird-ass job, which tends to disrupt my programming schedule.

The good news is that I've made excellent progress on the game in the last month, and the map editor is a few days from being complete. The reason I'm putting so much effort into the editor is that I'm going to encourage people to make their own maps before the game is released, and have them freely available from the site. A decent map can take as little as half an hour to make, while more complex (and detailed) maps can take multiple hours.

The AI isn't difficult, but it's terribly fiendish to debug, mostly due to how time consuming it can be to set up battlefield conditions that allow for certain actions. Plus, there's a factor of "randomosity" in every action the AI selects, so the game doesn't play out like chess, where every given response can be accurately predicted based on set criteria.

Bottom line -- you'll see it this year. When exactly, I cannot say, for fear of my own safety and sanity.

As I'm still working on redesigning the site, you can keep track of progress at the forum:

FB: Cry Havoc Forum

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[Sirocco]

Just me playing around with some blank textures to create a "disco" look :)




A very simple map-in-progress, but the lack of variety in textures really hurts the overall quality of presentation. As I build more block textures the maps will improve substantially.



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[Bjorn]

The screenshots look great but one thing I find lacking is shadow casting. Do you still plan to put that in? I think it would improve the visual quality greatly, even if it was only a single intensity and direction.

[Sirocco]

I considered doing that within the engine, but I may opt to let the user do it manually within the map editor. If I do implement this it will be a 'stright down' type of shadowing, so as not to mess with any extra shadowing stuff with the sprites. I'm trying hard to avoid feature creep in this project, as it was intended to be relatively simple :)

I also didn't want to make it automatic in case the player decides to do something really unique within the map editor.
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