The huge Summer 2013 Update

Hello there!

The Summer is finally over, and it's definitely time for an update. Just a small elucidation: Autumn here begins the 21st of September, so for as much as my idea of time is messed up, the introduction makes perfectly sense in my country.

Now, to some news.

First of all, in the last update I announced some potential good news. If I learnt something about being a project-manager and working on freeware games, it's certainly cautiousness with news. Forge is like a boat during a perfect storm, when the only stability comes from being in the eye of the storm. It's temporary, and it doesn't last long; for the rest of the time, it's a constant, chaotic roll.
To cut it short: a really talented artist offered his help with the game's backgrounds. He's closer to what I'd like to have as a team-member than any of the previous ones. He's really talented, has consistent past experiences, serious but not boring, and he's humble enough to work just to experiment on his own style, and not for money.
What else could you ask from a team-mate? Well, I could ask more free time. Like most of us, even this guy has a family, other interests, and bills that need to be paid. And to make things worse, his free time became even less recently, due to several happenings which are independent from both of our wills.

Good news is that he completely reworked one of the backgrounds for Chapter One, which only served the purpose of a short cutscene before. I had to paint it by myself previously, and the result was only decent. Now it's gorgeous, and the new design called for some extra features. Now there are really interesting elements of gameplay and some cool features which make that room different from the rest of the game and yet coherent with it.

Of course, all of this required time: not just for the extra design, coding and sfx creation, but also because when you start working with someone on such an important part of the game, you need to instruct him about the game's back story, the atmosphere, and the technicalities.

In the end it was worth it, I believe, but I can't say if the guy will be available to work on Chapter 3-5 backgrounds.

Another potentially interesting news is I'm working with a lively amateur film director, who's also interested in doing some PR work for the game. A position far more crucial than it might seem, as spreading the word seems to be our best chance to find more and more people to help us developing Forge. Art is still a huge issue, and what slows up development the most.
Still on the topic of news, I've been recently interviewed about Forge, but I'll tell you more about that on the next update.

Voice-acting: several unexpected issues and some of the suggestions of the beta-testers required some dialogues to be added, and some to be reworked from scratch. Some people didn't do what they were supposed to, and so I had to do some scouting for new voices. That meant a lot of selective work, with extra bad surprises from some of the contacted people. Not many choices are left now, but some good ones with professional equipment, and the lines that have to be recorded are not that many, so I think everything will work out fine, in the end.

Bugs: I think I've fixed all the ones spotted during the 2nd beta-stage, but I definitely need another beta-stage because of all the extras and to check the fixes. I'm totally positive that this is going to be faster and smoother than the previous tests, to the point that I'm finally going to make the long awaited announcement:

Forge's release date has been set to the first half of December!

And I'm talking about 2013, so this should be great news for all of you weavers. Or so I hope.

I'm not sure I'll manage this beta-stage as the previous ones, with open subscriptions. Somehow that didn't turn out that well, so I'll probably come up with a different approach. I'll let you know in the next few days, and anyway I intend to begin the testing in the third week of October.

I really hope this will be considered a positive update. Personally, I'm quite satisfied.

May the Forge be with you,
-Gabriele "Abisso" Nannetti