That's one small step for man, and one giant leap for Shapekind!

Hello to the vastness of the interwebz!

And what sort of time is this!?  Yeah I admit we're a bit late, but that's not the whole pie...

In 2009 I made my first drawing of the Shapians, and although the shakiness of my lines made them look seemingly different than the Shapians you see today, they are nothing shy of my dream. This past weekend, the words "It works!" would not stop spewing out of our mouths as we watch the black DOS window as if it was the newest addition to the Elder Scrolls series.

Of course, we knew that the bugs weren't that severe, but they still were quite frightening.  Dealing with problems born from the combination of the simple and sweet but C based Lua scripting library, and the hard to learn but staggeringly powerful RakNet library, it seemed as if the project was swimming up stream.  As a team, Connor and I and everyone from OverReact were determined to finish that swim.  When we stopped looking at DOS screens and started writing scripts to load in sprites, we saw our several year fantasy become a fantastic reality.

Speaking of sprites, for a very long time we have been making new graphics as we waited for the code to finally work (no offense programming department) , but not until now did we finally see the combination of fully animated circles, triangles, and squares, running and jumping on top of grass and dirt. And surprisingly it is all meshing together as if our photoshop projects are screenshots of the future A Shapian's Tale.

So with the graphics finally reaching a presentable state (no offense graphics department) and the code being more powerful and expandable than ever, there was only one thing left to do: make the game.  As you can see in the screen shot we recently had our first ever AST party.  Ten people logged on to run across the world, jumping around in utter joy and madness, and as we like to call it "dance" (a secret move only discovered by those who walk back and forth very quickly.)

Ten people, that's nine more people than we have ever seen play ASTonline. Such a feat for the most indie of indie-developers. All sarcasm set aside, we must admit the amount of happiness experienced this weekend has blown away the frustration that has boiled up for the past 3 years. We spent all this time telling our fans (hopefully you guys) we were making an awesome game more unique than any of it's kind, and this was the first breaths of just that!

So if you did miss out on our first party, don't worry, we've got many more coming, and they're only going to get better. We do not have anything to upload yet, but there are several parties coming up and we would like to invite everyone!  Firstly look forward to *AST Tech 1.0* coming this weekend, party this Saturday.  Finally, we don't have any details to give for this project yet - we don't know just how much we will end up including - but mark this date in your calender: 4/1/2012.

I know we have said this once, but only you can prevent forest fires. Stay frosty people,

-Connor

And as always, if your blood pressure gets too high, there are several cereals that treat that.  Until next time, 

-Allen