27th of April (2003 :P).

In a bid to encourage me to work, Dev has threatened to release the demo 4 beta I sent him a while back if I don’t release something first. Isn’t he kind :P

You will get something, and it will be worth waiting for. Hopefully taking time off to do demo 4 won’t affect my university grade (much) ;)

Expect many more updates in the coming weeks, as I race to beat the maniacal Devlyn and his army of robot bratwurst…

After the success of a similarly-named topic at Ye Olde Blah, Ty and I have decided to produce an article on the development process of Demo 4, and how SO has evolved since the release of Demo 3 at the end of 2001. Expect to see screenshots, developmental sketches, more screenshots and lots of other nice stuff :)

I hope you can consider your SO appetite well and truly whetted :P

Still a long way to go, but I’ve been fiddling with online options recently. Unsuprisingly, it looks like it’s going to be a lot of work to get anything remotely playable done.

Got something very nice to show. I’m hoping to have some shots of it up next weekend. ;)

I suppose I should get around to finishing Demo 4 :P No idea when it’ll be ready now. I want to add more to it, so it could be quite a while.

It WILL be worth the wait :P

I’m sure you were all hoping that demo 4 was going to be released today, but I’m afraid you’ll all have to wait a little longer :P

Uni work has taken much of my time recently, but I’m trying to do some work on the demo. At the moment I’ve got a nice list of things that need fixing, so I’m plugging away at that. There’s also several features that I want to add before release. None are particularly special, but I won’t be happy until they’re in. Thanks for sticking with us and being patient, we realise how annoying it is to wait for something.

Aside from that, I’ve been working on the multiplayer aspects of the game. All the multiplayer modes are now designed, and it’s just a case of sorting out a few major details before I can start working on them. I hope to have screens of Newts and myself battling in the next few weeks.

SODA continues to grow, and I’m currently overhauling some of it’s core elements. More screens of that should be ready soon too. I’m quite pleased with how it’s looking, though more pleased with the programming that I’ve done to get it this far. It should be a pretty hefty piece of kit when it’s finished, though I’m still unsure as to whether it will become publicly available. Most of the features could cause an unfair advantage to some players (as well as causing errors online), so it’s something of a risk I’m not happy about taking.

I want to try and post news more regularly now. I’ve been slacking recently, so I apologise for that.

The future holds only good things!

That’s right! Shining Online demo 3 has hit 2000 downloads, and shows no sign of slowing down!

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded demo 3. I don’t think we ever realised it would become half as popular as it is. Thank-you!

For demo 4 news, check the news this weekend :)