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[hemmingjay]

A conversation with a tester has reminded me of something I took for granted. In order to test certain features we must tweak and break other elements of the game. This really doesn't let you experience or judge the game in a favorable light. I want to thank you for being patient and withholding judgement or judging us on the concept you can see rather than what you are currently experiencing. Specifically, the very slow progress made by using public transport only in the first build. As a reward for your patience, I will give you a little bonus to enjoy until the next Alpha test.

Press F1 for $10 million dollars. It is repeatable infinitely. I suggest just giving yourself $50 or $100 million and not touching it again. It's enough to set yourself up to where you would be 30 minutes into a game and won't ruin the rest of the experience.

Some known bugs to avoid;
Don't use warehouses
There is a crash upon quitting-unavoidable

[Kaje]

How's it coming along?

[The13thRonin]

Release date?

[hemmingjay]

Things are going well. We are working on adding the abilities and tweaking the AI for other arms dealers and agencies. We are now at a point where we have to decide if we give in to peer pressure and give people beta access or if we stick to our hopelessly idealistic values and wait until the game is finished. Either way it will be released with bugs because indies can't test on enough hardware before launching. I have a deal with Alienware where they are going to certify us on more than 60 hardware configurations, but it's a drop in the bucket.

I don't know.

We could release a beta by the second week of September or the final build on Oct 6 or 8th.

[Glloyd]

Stick to your hopelessly idealistic values!

That's just my opinion though, I understand if monetary issues pressure you otherwise.

[hemmingjay]

We can live off of no money for a while longer. I have offers of loans and such that I can also take or people who are trying to buy in to partial ownership of the game or studio. It's more of an issue of giving people what they want. Way more people are asking for beta access than are happy that I am not charging for beta access or pre-orders.

[The13thRonin]

We can live off of no money for a while longer. I have offers of loans and such that I can also take or people who are trying to buy in to partial ownership of the game or studio. It's more of an issue of giving people what they want. Way more people are asking for beta access than are happy that I am not charging for beta access or pre-orders.

How much ownership of your game will $1 AUD get me ?

[Anvilfolk]

Honestly, as long as the game is feature complete and you are looking for bug-squashing, it makes sense to release it with the appropriate disclaimers. Especially if it means you don't have to compromise in other areas, like actually owning the game studio...

[Neonivek]

A conversation with a tester has reminded me of something I took for granted. In order to test certain features we must tweak and break other elements of the game.

Oddly enough the vast majority of cheats in videogames, especially with older videogames, originate from things they used to test the game or even to get favorable screen shots.

I actually really miss cheat codes existing...

For fighting games, for example, a unlock cheat code would go a long way.

[hemmingjay]

Just for you Neo, we will add a secret cheat code but won't announce it's existence until 60 days after release. You must suffer the standard game that long(assuming you are interested even) before we will give you the keys to the kingdom. Unless of course you reverse engineer the code and find it sooner.

[Kaje]

Will there be any other easter eggs, Hems?

[Kaje]

*Bump* for an update!

[Sensei]

Yes, I'm curious about the latest happenings as well.

[hemmingjay]

Sorry for being quiet guys, I was working from the beach annex for the last week and had limited internet.

Update:
 We have 10 Arms dealer AI working well, one working too well. Zeke, our lead programmer left the game running overnight, as is our custom with new builds, and by morning Arms Dealer #10 had amassed over $1 Trillion in trading in what would be 10-12 years of in game time. We adjusted his behavior a bit to keep it in line with the expected difficulty. He had choked off a lot of the other traders by beating them to deals, building up relationships with large suppliers to get the best prices which let him buy most of the auction vehicles which in turn gave him a huge advantage in logistics and pricing. It was really quite brilliant to look at after the fact and it's a great player strategy, but unless the setting was on the hardest, the player would have likely been stuck behind this dealer the entire game, losing to auctions and such.

We also have 4 specific agencies working as intended, the raw setup, without backstory, is The basic agency AI travels the world learning the player's likely locations to be at or head to and tries to capture and arrest/fine/seize.  The peace keepers agency end wars which increases the value of weapons when they disband.  The bounty hunters agency have a chance to catch you and take your bounty's worth of money the longer you stay in a country where your paid intel is less than your bounty.  Finally there is the last agency which travels the world just like the basic AI but also blocks countries with counter intel.

We have some minor tweaking to do but we are likely to release the game in true beta state around Sept 15 if everything goes well with the art production. I will try to get a new playable build for you guys by the weekend, but no promises.  Thanks for staying interested!

[LordSlowpoke]

don't nerf #10, move #10 to hard mode and slap something else in #10s place

hard is hard yo