Update!

Alright folks,

As promised here’s an update of what’s going on:

Firstly, a date for your calendar. If anyone is London bound on Friday the 17th of October our friends at the XNA UK User Group have organised a ‘Show and Tell’ for Plain Sight and the incredibly awesome Sumo Squash at the Microsoft lair HQ near Victoria. If you’re poor and hungry, there will be free food and drink (perhaps booze).
Full details can be found here.

Development for Plain Sight has moved up a gear. It’s now the metaphorical 11 on the metaphorical guitar amp.

I’ll start on the tech side and move to the realms of artiness.

We’ve been lucky enough to enlist the services of Michael Lidgren. Michael is best known for his .net network library (originally named) ‘Lidgren.’ It’s totally free, open source and is now the backbone to Plain Sight’s multiplayer hootenannies.
‘Why do I care?’ you ask. Well, you should, because of the simple formula:  better the networking = more killer robots – lag + other cool stuff

Lawrence has been hard at work plugging in a new and improved gravity system.  Not only can you run up walls and all over the ceiling; you can now jump/fall off a platform and then run along its underbelly. Ace! Whilst working on this, we’ve been spending quite a deal of time getting the camera working just right. Not only does the game feel natural, intuitive, smooth (and similar such words) on an Xbox controller but also with a keyboard and mouse.

Although it’s not as sassy and sexy, it does deserve a mention - Alex has had the joyous task of hammering out the cockroaches from the Plain Sight code.

Thanks to The Audio Guys, the sounds are pretty much finished – there’s still a bit of tweaking and reworking to do, but this shouldn’t take long. Afraid there is still no news on the music, this is something we’re going to work on during the beta test.

Most of the work has been on the look and feel of Plain Sight. We’ve thrown in a new  cartoon shader engine. This will be something you’ll be able to turn on and off in game, so if you want that classic ‘pre-beta’ Plain Sight look, you still can but you’ll probably agree with us that the new look is cooler than unicorns.  

We’re now up to ten levels that we’re pretty certain are going to make the beta. Over the next month we need to play the living hell of them to make 100% certain they’re up to scratch. For a multiplayer game we feel that it’s quality not quantity; so we’re looking for as much feed back as possible from you guys during beta...

There is more stuff (like new sword slashes, spawn points etc ) but my fingers are getting tired. So, enough of me, jump over to the brand spangling new screenshots section for a gander at what we're up to.