Alpha Incoming!

Things have been going quite smoothly with development! We're planning to be ready for an Alpha release by the New Year.

Content
Once again conceptart.org came through. Our post for a background artist received THIRTY responses over the course of a couple weeks, with 25 coming in only two days.

I felt bad having to turn away so many talented artists, but we only had a single opening!

To narrow the field, we asked for a sample of work. It was a very efficient method, but in retrospect I now see that it also comes off as a bit sketchy. As was pointed out to us, some less scrupulous studios use this tactic to get free concept art and ideas...in the future we'll have to come up with a better way to sort through applicants.

In either case, we're now two Mikes strong! I'd like to welcome Mike Phillips (http://www.mikephillips.ca)to the team. As you can see from his portfolio, he's extremely talented and we're eager to see what he comes up with for the first battleground.

Work on the "knight" unit type (the last of the three units planned for Alpha), should be completed shortly. He's been the most difficult of the three so far, but we're almost there! A few more refinements and Mike V. (http://sites.google.com/site/michaelvportfolio) will be able to get started on the animations. Mike has done a simply FANTASTIC job with bringing the mage and dragon units to life.



Server

• Timed Mod Events - Synergies can now add Mods to units that will trigger effects at intervals. This will allow for some very interesting gameplay dynamics. Currently we're planning for the knight to have a Synergy called Lifefont, which periodically heals allies of a small amount of damage. Since mods can stack, a trio of these guys will be very hard to take down!
• Smart Unit Updates - Only the state changes since the last update are sent to the players now. This should cut down dramatically on the bandwidth used to keep the players up to date. Right now we're seeing updates consume ~40-60kB per game, which isn't too bad at all.

Client

• Added audio support to the Resource Manager - HTML5 has a weird quirk where HTMLAudioElements cannot be played multiple times simultaneously. My solution was to maintain a list of them instead, dynamically allocating new ones for each sound effect if all existing instances of a sound are already playing. This was especially necessary for the mage character since at high levels his Fireflail ability can generate quite a few fireballs
• Implemented a flexible particle system and integrated it as a new SceneNode type. It has support for arbitrary Particle class implementations as well as Effectors. Currently I've implemented Wind, Gravity, and Gravity Wells. Chrome is so ridiculously fast that my meager dual-core rig can handle ~500 particles at once in addition to all the other graphics. Not bad for not having a GPU at your disposal!