Under Construction

Hello dear viewers,

We are very sorry for not keeping up with our blog, but it is due to the time we are spending on our new website( and blog ) it should be up within the next 2 months, and until then, we will be inactive on the blog, we will however make use of our twitter, so please do follow @teamoverreact on twitter!

Thanks for the love!

-Team Overreact

Moar News!

Hello, hello!

So we are moving across the halfway point of April and even in 14 days a lot has been underway. As far as development news for AST, we are currently implementing some more functionality in our C++ code in order to make the party system work correctly. Now this does mean we will be a bit behind as compared to the previous weeks, but you will find that this next update is worth the wait. How so you ask?

Well for starters there will be much more to do in this update, this is mainly because the Shapians are no longer alone! These other beings are the very first Shanimals the Shapians have ever seen, and what better to do than hunt them!? That's right, we are equipping all players with a spear, and their own inventory for resource gathering. For now, you wont be able to throw the spear, but fierce jabbing should do the trick. Once you have successfully hunted a Shanimal you will be able to take their meat, bone, and hide. The uses of these items have not been made clear yet, however that is something we will have figured out before you all have a chance to play. We are thinking of what shanimals would be best to see in the game, and since we want to make it as caveman as we can, we have went with the Great Squelk, and the Wolly Squammoth. We do want some type of aerial shanimal, as well as another medium-sized one. So we will see what we come up with!

In addition to some development news, last week I had an exclusive interview with On The Prowl's Shane Bradley (@Shanejawn). On The Prowl is an up and coming podcast show which has a segment on video games, so make sure you follow them! The interview was about 26 minutes long, and packed with tons of info on AST. We discuss release dates, gameplay possbilities, as well as a chance we could see shapian's in space one day! you can listen below:

Podcast Powered By Podbean

or you can listen here

To wrap it up, lets look at the poll! So this most recent poll was indeed our biggest, with over 40 votes! So thank you to anyone out there who voted, we love to see what you all want the most. Speaking of which, what were the results thus far? The race between mercantile, quests, and buildings has not been a competitive one, at least for quests that is. We have buildings at 8 votes, mercantile at 10 votes, and quests at a staggering 26 votes! Although there are 3 days left to vote, I would be most surprised of quests where to lose the race.

With that said, we can't wait to show hunting to you all soon, and if you haven't voted please do so!

Until next time, this was your friendly neighborhood game designer,

-Connor Hart

And they said: "Let there be a party"

Hello folks, have we got a treat for you today! We find ourselves in an usual position this Saturday, we are ahead of schedule... the things we had planned for next Saturday came together so quickly, that just said "Hey why not, do it this week?" So, if you have not already guessed, that means, AST Party 3!

Here are instructions on how the game will work from here on out, after today, we will very rarely have to post new updates onto the blog. Today you will download the AST launcher, running the launcher will automatically download and start the game for you. If there are updates it will automatically download them, and if the updater is updated, the updater will be automatically updated! The only work left up to you is to play A Shapians Tale.

The updater, to bind all updaters

More features are packed into the game as well, so AST Party 3 will be the best one yet! Party begins at 9pm EST, the server will be down until then. Hope to see you there!

Please, no photographs,
Allen Webster

P.S. as usual email me at yoyo4thdimention@gmail.com if you have any urgent issues.

Welcome to Shapia!

Once again we find ourselves on the blog, second time in under a month! From the looks of it, this is something you will surely see more often. By "From the looks of it" I am speaking about the hyper-speed development the team began after the last post we made.

Five days ago we posted an image of our first ever AST party, in this image was a bunch of Shapians of all different shapes and colors (pun intended) jumping up and down on some grass. Now the world is overgrown with flowers, trees, bushes, clouds, rocks, and our very own minigame! We stopped ourselves from adding more features that lay at our very finger tips so that we could finally, for once, meet the deadline we set.  For real.

Although we would love to talk more about how awesome the game is, we would love to give thanks to the guy who invented links!

Obviously this is something important ...*whistles*...

The party starts at 9pm, EST!

Be there or be square.... you can be a square anyway, that's cool too.

- Connor & Allen

P.S. if you have any issues such as unable to start the client, errors, bugs, or anything that you may find important, you can contact: yoyo4thdimention@gmail.com  The party doesn't start until 9pm EST if you can't play before then... its your fault for jumping the gun.  See you there!

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

Progress Is Contagious

As Connor mentioned in the previous blog post, a wave of productivity hit us across the face a few weeks ago. Now we are cooking through important work faster than I think we ever have. Sure we're still busy with school but just in the last two days of this weekend we've:

created a video
reorganized our kickstarter efforts
finalized a networking library interface
got the band back together
and started a lua testing minigame

A few other things have happened, but they don't count as the last two days, so they were left out. Now as I mentioned we created a video:

The Cat Traps Are Working

Progress has to be made on the minigame while the Networking library is developed by Ben, but hopefully we will be able to post a very entertaining minigame soon.

As mentioned in the video we are also going to have another indie(Function) interview coming up this February. We are looking forward to it and if you heard the last interview you probably are too. (Just sayin' those guys are really good at what they do). To follow indie function look for them on twitter and go to their site:

indie();

There's a lot more coming down the pipe, hats on and don't look up... some of the things coming down are going to be big!

-Allen

One Year Later, One Year Left?

Hello and happy end of days!

As we all begin the last year of humanity, A Shapian's Tale has reached it's first full year of development! What does this mean for you guys? Well you might see AST out of beta and into release just in time for the apocalypse! I know that doesn't sound all too great, but maybe I can soften the blow with some good news eh?

Well for starters, the ball is finally rolling, and boy is it rolling fast! We are finally geting things setup in Lua, and finishing up the bulk of the C++. So within the coming months you will be playing AST on a frequently updated client. This will not be the Alpha however, we will keep adding features until we are almost ready for Alpha, and then do some closed testing for a little while. Once the closed testing is up, we will release Public Alpha, and you will all start the official story of A Shapian's Tale! In addition to this we are expecting the avatars to be done by the next month according to our Graphic Designer Ed Kulb. Hopefully this meets its deadline and we have the Kickstarter project ready for launch early this year.

Digging a little deeper into the depths of the OverReact game making cave, there has been some recent prototyping for features in AST, one being scroll crafting. Scroll crafting is a type of crafting in which the player places a series of attributes onto a scroll and connects them correctly to make magical scrolls. Below you can see some screenshots of the prototype of the very promising feature in AST.

Many more prototypes will be made as we move on in development (each - including scroll crafting - will have a vlog for an in depth overview), by the time we are ready to actually implement these features we will have a complete understanding of how the mechanics should work. Some of these upcoming prototypes will include mercantile, blacksmithing, carpentry, and also food and recipe crafting. Each of these will be shown in a vlog like what you see above for scroll crafting.

Well I hope this all shined some light on the dreadful fate of humanity, until next time this is your neighborhood friendly game designer,

-Connor Hart

On Thanksgiving Day

Hello our faithful fans!

Today is the American holiday Thanksgiving. Although I try to be well cultured, I do not really know anything about other countries on this matter. Do they have their own version of the holiday at some time of year? Do any celebrate thanksgiving on this same day? I am just unaware.

But the reason I brought up the holiday at all is because it got me thinking about... you guessed it A Shapian's Tale.

You see, on this kick starter project we are going to run, we are looking to raise thousands of dollars. It occurred to me that with that money, in some parts of the world, one hundred people could be fed for nearly a month. So, for me anyway, I have to have a pretty good reason to ask for money that I am going to spend a game.

Not that I don't love games, but at the end of the day they do fall in the luxury category. As in, completely unnecessary for survival, no matter how awesome they are.

So I have decided personally (I have not talked to anyone on the team for about a week because I have been busy with school work) that I will donate 80% of my income from the game to fighting starvation throughout the world. For this reason I will also be taking the job more seriously and scraping every bit of time I can get to focus on it.

Anyway, happy thanksgiving to anyone who's into that.
Allen Webster

Humble News For AST.

Like times and times before, things have sort of died out for the team and the project. School has become a priority, and the programmers have become busy with school work. But now with thanksgiving break closing in, the team has had more time for development! Lua is working correctly, and we are working on interfacing it with what we have currently working. 

Things are a bit behind schedule, like the kickstarter launch for instance. But we are still very close to getting those squared away. Right now our Graphic Designer Ed Kulb is looking to have all 13 avatars done before December. We hope to have the video finished with a soundtrack from Composer Patrick Moriarty by the first week of December. What does this mean for you guys? This means you will be able to follow are kickstarter project and possibly see an Alpha Demo just in time for the holidays! Now this all seems great, but we are still running a tight schedule, and look at this as merely a possibility.

Some other news, there is word of a possible "Humble AST Bundle", which will include a copy if the game, and various items exclusive to the "Humble Bundle". If this falls through, you guys will have a chance to buy the game just by "Naming it's Price". We are currently figuring all of this out, and will have a final decision once the Alpha releases. Some very exciting news for the game, but what about us? What about OverReact?

Well, there is currently some business going on with Founder Connor Hart and Law Firm Merritt & Merritt & Moulton. This means there is a very large chance OverReact will officially be known as OverReact inc. We hope that once this all happens OverReact will have a studio sometime next year or the year after. So OverReact is doing really good, and is only getting better! :D

Lastly I want to mention the last poll we put up, and its results. We are very pleased to only see 1 "No" result out of 20. We can't wait to have the project launch, and see the results! Also, I wanted to say that if you have any questions you can leave a comment below, or shoot me and email at: ronnoc614@gmail.com

Thanks guys, and stay tuned, more news very soon!

-Connor

Hiring! No Joke!

Hey guys, this is Allen. (programming team leader for any new readers who should check out the About page.)

Recently we have made the final decision to work with an embedded Lua interpreter. What does this mean? For players this means:

+Easier to make, and safer to use mods
+More frequent and less disruptive updates

What this means for us:

+More rapid game component development
-New work to maintain the interface between C++ and Lua
-A brand new language which the team is less strong in


I have already begun experimenting and working on how interfacing between C++ code and Lua code works, and I intend for it to be my primary job to keep the connection between the two working.

I have a small amount of Lua experience, and Mike another member also has a good deal of experience BUT with a brand new language in the mix we'd like a dedicated Lua programmer.

SO THE JOB IS:

We are looking for someone proficient in Lua 5.1, who has experience in embedded interpreters and game design. We need someone who is dedicated to making the game, even with no pay guaranteed. The Lua programming won't start at least until October, but we also need help with some basic design details. We are only hiring one person for now and we aren't sure how many interested people there will be but if you are interested, email me at:

yoyo4thdimention@gmail.com

'Till next time!
watch your language.

Back and kicking!

Hello to the greatest fans/people who stumbled upon our blog and are deciding whether to leave or not!

So let me start by saying: I have officially moved to Burlington, Vermont! Yep that's right, I am now a full time student at Chaplain College for Game Design! So far the experience is remarkable, from the scenery to my professors, everything here is amazing. And I have even more great news! Thanks to the fact that I only have class for 2 1/2 hours a day, I have more time for A Shapian's Tale! Ahhhh so many exclamation marks right? very exciting stuff guys, very exciting. Now lets move on to some more.....say serious matters, shall we?

Recently we have been discussing a better way for the team to document progress, and stay on te same page rather than trying to find out the scoop on skype. So we have decided that we need a website of some sort which will allow all of us to make notes of what we are doing, what we need to do, and what we have done. But here is where you come in! We want our fans(you odd bunch of people) to view milestones of progress so that you all can see that we are indeed working, and not sitting here preparing for the next world disaster....even though that isn't a bad idea. these milestones will basically be a compilation of all the notes, strenuous, concept etc. which we produce. We will indeed keep making posts on here, but we figure some of you would like to see the chefs make your food right before you eyes :D

As well as that main entree there will be some more appetizers for you all to test and taste! Right now from the looks of our situation, the next payable content could arrive between September and December. And we are hoping that it isn't the latter, but that may be the case. For this next release we are aiming to include some more key features, and slowly move away from the sandbox style you have experienced. Also, this next release should also hold the title of "Alpha" I would like to give you a list of what will be in this release, but then I would not have anything to talk about in my next Vlog entry now would I?

'Till next time this was your neighborhood friendly game designer,

-Connor

Multiplayer for multiple players

Hello dearest of fans and other people who are reading this!

Today I am here to tell you 3 great things that OverReact has accomplished. To start things off, I will present you with the latest concept art made by Connor Hart(me), it shows a very epic boss battle of some shapians and  a powerful fire mage. This image took about 8 hours to develop and it turned out great. It looks great as your desktop background too, so hurry up and save it as so :D

This concept is going to be a poster, and be set as a reward when we launch our kickstarter project. So to anyone who wants this hanging in their room, help us out on kickstarter(after we launch of course).

Now for the next great news! Me and Allen are having an interview with Indie(Function); for A Shapian's Tale! you can listen through their site, or just listen right below, we hope many of you listen in and hear the inside scoop of what we are up to with the game! :D



Lastly, we would like to present you with the greatest news we have, the news you have been waiting for for too long.....Today, A Shapian's Tale goes online! Yep i know what your thinking(i think), and we aren't joking this time! You can find this demo on the A Shapian's Tale page at the very bottom. The demo includes the following features:

• Block physics - three different blocks to choose from
• Drawing terrain - using the mouse with key combinations
• Drawing trampolines - same as drawing terrain(uses alt)
• Multiplayer! - yeah pretty obvious but its the best feature!

IMPORTANT: Be sure to read the controls in the command window!!

You can come chat with us on our IRC channel(since we don't have chatting yet) which is: #AST on the SlashNET sever

AST Tech Demo - Online

That about does it for today's post! make sure you vote in the new poll, and tell us what you think about the demo! With that i advise you not to overreact although it may be difficult not to

-Connor

Out of State

Hey it's Allen.

I am posting from a hotel in Kentucky on an iPod my friend Jacob Robinson has lent to me. I won't be able to work for the week. But the demo is fairly simple for us to handle we just need to work on getting a few different server client issues up to par. I've finished revisions to the game engine which greatly help us to not make sloppy game code leading to problems which ruined the march demo. Now I only need to work on a clean set of physics abstractions. After that, adding networking will a little graphical magic will sum up the new demo. We have clean networking in the old systems already and it's pretty fun.

Cya later guys!

Systems online

Hello all, I waited for the recent poll to close to make another post so here i go!

Recently we have gotten yet another team member! His name is Benjamin Bias, and so far he is not highly opinionated. His specializes in Networking, so you know what that means! We are finally getting over the dreadful networking hill in this project. Only after having him for a few days did he have our recent demo running online. It still had some issues, but he and the rest of the programming team are working on fixing those, to finally have something stable to show you guys! While the networking is being done, Allen has been revising the game engine, taking out unnecessary pieces of code, and simplifying others. Everything seems to be going smoothly, and we are well on our way to getting over this hill we all hate.

In other news, Allen has been doing some experiments with matrices, and has discovered very very powerful methods which we can use in many areas for not only AST, but for other projects we get involved in. However, I will wait for him to post sometime this coming week, in which he will go over some programming info in detail.

As for the poll you see to the right, we were surprised we didn't get more votes actually. We received 12 votes, 10 of which were likes, and 2 of which were dislikes. Pretty good numbers, and we are pleased. we would like to have gotten more likes, but hey we can't always get what we want. We will have another poll up once we make another release, which i am not sure when that will be. However! The next release will allow everyone to play together, online. So if there is anything to really be excited for, it is that you can play with your friends finally!

I think that is it for this post, we hope to have more info soon!

-Connor

P.S. Yes i did use two memes in one post :3

Post-Demo Developments

First time posting, try not to say anything stupid...

My name is Tyler Camp (aka GZ), and I'm the guy who developed the demo that was just recently released. Of course, it wasn't all my work, Allen, Mike (K), and I all contributed to the engine that is currently being used. But the important piece is the time frame in which the demo was developed:

Connor came to me about 3 days before his presentation stating that he was rushing to get his final pieces put together. I didn't know that the show was that Friday, but I offered to get a basic demo out for him.

Making the player class: 1 hour

Making the box class: 2 hours (with fiddling, I had to mess around with the physics mask to make it fit all of the sprites that were different sizes [Thanks Cameron])

Making the buttons: 1 hour

Adding strict line-drawing: 1 hour

Adding free-form line drawing: 1 hour

Adding views (and applying): 20 minutes

Swapping out player physics: 2 hours

Adding shadows: 30 minutes

Adding line/box clearing: 1 minute

If I went right through and made all of the underlying changes that I had ended up with, it would've taken me a total of about 5 hours of coding to make that demo. But, like with all games, I took my time adjusting the rotation and scaling rate of the buttons, the distance between line separations when in free-form, how much the shadows scaled based on the object's height, etc. Fortunately, even without a GUI to assist in creating the demo (we don't have a game editor, just a coding library), it took about as long as it probably would have if I was using Game Maker.

So, on to the actual point of this topic: What we're going to be doing now that this demo has been out.

Now that we have the physics and basic game project management mechanics completed, we have to focus on continuing with our GUI engine and creating a networking test bed for our online libraries. The GUI engine currently only has tabs, buttons, and text boxes, but it provides the basis of what we need to develop more components for an interface without too much of a hassle (and it also got me a 100 in my programming class, but who cares about that).

As for the networking testbed, we're developing it so that we can assure that any problems that arise will be a result of poor programming on the game development side, and not deriving from an inefficiency from the networking manager. Allen was put in charge of the networking piece of the engine when we had gotten to it, and unfortunately we all rushed to get a game out to test how well it did. We knew it worked, but we didn't know if it did what we wanted it to. Unfortunately, there was an IMMENSE amount of lag in that demo, and many of the game mechanics didn't work anyways. With the networking testbed we'll be able to focus on just the online piece of our engine and track the speed of each stage within our TCP message handling.

Fortunately, we'll be putting our GUI engine to work in that test bed since we've been getting tired of CLIs, so this should help us know whether or not my work will end up being usable.

So to sum it up, we'll be working on the GUI engine so that we can build a place to test how well we handle networking. One step at a time.

It has arrived!

Hello dearest of fans!

I am here to give you a little taste of what we have made starting from complete scratch! Now it may not seem like much to some of you, but please understand that this is only a small taste of the physics, and some graphical work.

Our biggest issue with the full game right now is getting the online to work, with that we can have something like this online, and keep adding to it. We hope that our issues with getting connections working are cleared soon, and we can let all of you see features upon features build the AST we have been trying encumber for so long.

This tech demo is a physics simulation, with a movable Shapian, push blocks, and terrain creation with the mouse. It is NOT online(as I stated before), and it takes place in what we call "Limbo". It is a never ending white room, which you could have endless sandbox fun!

You are able to see the square Leunamme Shapian, and 3 different types of push blocks(wooden crate, dirt clump, and stone). The Shapian is NOT animated, but when we release the alpha version of the game, you will see all player animations we have created thus far.

Make sure you read the text document labeled "CONTROLS" for the tech demos control layout, that will be all....

Enjoy! :3 <-- yes this is a link ;)

-Connor

Howdy!

Well hello there, it's Allen, and I promise I am not going to patronize you any more about how sorry we are about the slow progress we've been making.

The purpose of the post is just to let everyone know I am getting back to programming. I have been busy for a while and I still haven't quite finished an online class I am in. But the ol' days of C++ have been calling for me for quite a while and today I am going to begin easing myself back to work. I won't be right back in the middle of AST though, I have another project I am going to work on which might be related to the game a bit.

Anyway this marks my return to C++, anything could happen.
-Allen

Long time....no time....

Well hello guys, been awhile eh?

Things have been going very slow here with AST. However there is nothing we can do about that until the beginning of June. This is because of our schedules are very hectic lately. I am in the midst of begging Champlain College for more money, finishing up my senior project, as well as studying for finals. Allen is dealing with a rather large Latin class he has been putting off due to the development of A Shpaians' Tale. He told me he is on Chapter 15 out of 21, and is moving quite fast. I know that Tyler is busy with school and his internship at AMD, so hopefully by June things will calm down in school for all of us, and we can work full time on AST.

Although I am very busy, I have been throwing ideas around in my head for AST, and figured I would share them with you guys and see what you all think:

• Personal story: Your Shapian has their own personal story line throughout the game. This story is generated in a semi-random fashion. You will have a few choices during character creation, which change the generation of your Shapian's story.You story will deal with NPCs in the game, and possibly(I really want) others players as well.
• Binding quests: When you are in  party exploring the wilderness, there is a chance that a random quest will be put upon that party. This quest must be completed to leave the wilderness. As of now, we have come up with one example of this and that is a kidnapping quest. One player would get kidnapped from a group of trolls, or something of that sort. The other players in the party must rescue them, while the kidnapped player tries to escape for them self.
• Retiring: You can have the chance to retire your player, and he will be put into the real world as an NPC. He can give you quests which pertain to your personal story as well. If you retire your player, you clear a character slot in your account, and you can get small perks that you had before in you next character.

These are some of the recent ideas I have come up with, and discussed with some of the team. We want your input as well, so that we can have an idea of how we would implement them, or if we should implement them at all.

That is all for now guys, I will keep the blog updated, and I am going to be doing more Vlog entries covering  things like this as well.

'Till next time, this was your friendly neighborhood game designer,

-Connor

Work work work....

Hello everyone!

It has been awhile since i have spoken here.....almost 3 weeks in fact O_O

Well either way, Allen has been covering things on the blog pretty nicely, good job. I have been quite busy outside of AST, recently was accepted to Champlain College for their Game Design major. And I have to pay some deposits before the 1st of May.

However, I do always find time to come on, and see how the tech demo is looking. And it seems to be going well. You may be thinking to yourself "How so? You missed your deadline 2 weeks ago! D:" but I am very aware of the deadline we missed. However, we are still making the game even though we are 2 weeks off. Allen is in the process of rewriting some of the fundamental parts of our engine, but the sooner we do this, the less of a chance we miss more deadlines. He seems to be working rather quickly, and we are hoping to have everything working the way it should soon. We do have something playable....well......something working. I wouldn't call it "playable" since the amount of lag really makes things next to impossible to play. So these rewrites and fixes will really make things work the way we intended them to.

On the graphics side of things, we did finished the logo! :D check it out:

We will be making a few tweaks, but this is mainly what the logo will look like. It took a while to get thigns right, and we are very satisfied. However we would like if you told us what you think, so please leave a comment below!

With that I say, Hasta Luego!

-Connor

Lazy Week

Hey guys it's Allen again... so, it's nearly been a week since we pulled our heart breaking April Fools joke. For those of you who missed it, sorry, forgot to post it on the blog. We made a fake demo and rick roll'd a lot of fans on the yoyogames forums. The truth is a real demo is still just getting ready. We have a little something, but it is still very buggy, and some of the engine concepts appear to need some tweaking. We aren't going to release anything until we're satisfied with our work.

I am personally on vacation in Boston this week. So I have been forcing myself to stay off of the work... I love the game, but I don't wish to be a workaholic. I decided the least I could do is keep in touch with everyone. I will be back into the normal work schedule in just a few days, and who knows when the real demo will actually be read then. Again if you haven't already accepted the request to join my mailing list all official testing will happen through that mailing list.

Finally I would like to address an issue I think I have noticed. I was browsing around on kickstarter and realized I hadn't seen any successful MMO games. I searched it, and of the four projects three are failed, and one is going to fail in about nine days. The second part of the issue is this: Our game is all about team work at it's core. It's not going to work if you don't have people there to play with you. So for those two reasons, I compel you! If you know anyone who likes games, or MMOs, or whatever other reason you can think to love A Shapians Tale, point us out! Theoretically, if everyone reading this right now told just one friend to check out the blog. The entire community could suddenly double in size. It's that simple.

"Just some poorly articulated thoughts, written at midnight."

By Allen Webster