Yes, I’m still around. I’ve been quiet lately, because I’ve been busy working away at xii game #3. And if I do say so myself, it’s coming together pretty well.

It’s taken longer than I had originally expected due to two issues: a few week-long stretches of time when I couldn’t work on it because I found myself buried in real-work, and one area of production that has turned into a bit of a bottleneck. Who knew that translating the game into Japanese would take so long?

I should have started translation earlier, because several times now I’ve found myself in a position where there wasn’t much I could do until the next section of translation was completed, and that means finding time (when the baby is sleeping, the house is clean, the lawn is mowed, and we’re not worn out) to sit down with my wife and work through it. Such times are not frequent.

Nevertheless, the completion point is in sight but there’s still a lot of work to be done. The main milestones left are translating and implementing the endings, implementing Japanese versions of the GUIs, and making the documentation. There’s also a few graphical touch-ups that I need to do. Of course I’m also going to have to get some beta testers and beat the game up for a week or so to squeeze out any bugs that might’ve slipped by (let me know if you want to help out with this).

I’m won’t be so bold as to name a release date, but I’d like to have this done and into beta by the end of September. I’ll need to clear my calendar so I can spend some quality time with my Wii… err… family.

Oh, and while I’m here, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Erin “The Ivy” Robinson, creator of Spooks and friend of xii games!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.