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[Toady One]

Stop it!  Now I see all of the smileys as something obscene!  :-<

[SkeleTony]

Even this smiley? 8^)>(artist wearing glasses and goatee)

What about this one? 8==D(John Kerry or George Bush)
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(    B==D    ( ( _ |
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[Toady One]

Yes, quite.

I guess we missed the one year anniversary of this thread by a bit...  note how I properly hedged and waffled when I said it might be done in 10 months.  The eight year thing looks closer.  My teaching job is settling down.  The birthday game ended up taking longer than I thought, so I'm only doing that one on the weekends now.  Dwarves is about where it was, but it should start moving now.  Or I'll have to quit work.

[Aquillion]

10 minutes and 57 seconds, Toady.  I did the math, remember?  Statistics don't lie, so you'd better get crackin'.

...on, second thought, if statistics don't lie, that would mean that the game will be finished in 10 minutes and 57 seconds no matter what, indeed, regardless of whether or not you work on it!  So I guess you don't have to get crackin' after all.

[ September 14, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Toady One]

I have to teach some statistics later in the semester.  I'll let you write the lesson plan.  Should be bad-ass.

[Toady One]

All right, so after a phone conversation with the brother, aka ThreeToe, we have the following pared-down count remaining of the 656 that were left.

96/150/114.

So, what is this new system?  It's on the same scale as the original, which would mean something like the new count is 360.  However, these numbers, of course, have their own INTRINSIC MEANINGS, and the 150 and 114 weren't included in the 656.  Meaning the phone call trimmed/put off 560 things.  Your loss, yo.  A lot of them can be put in later -- they just won't be in the first release, which will now be a bit sooner.

96 = the number of core things left to do...  not that I can talk about them because most of them are still easter eggy

150 = the number of bugs, requests and other technical things that really need to be handled

114 = the number of shameless bloats that weren't trimmed but might still be

Fortunately, unlike, say, Armok, these numbers are all going down instead of up.  When the first two numbers reach zero, I'll release it.

[Prospero]

Nice! Dare I possibly say that this could mean a pre-Christmas release? =)

[ThreeToe]

It will certainly be released alot sooner than it would have otherwize.  And even when the extra complications were stripped away:  you will understand the magnitude.  you will see that you were missing nothing.

and the 5000 years you would have been waiting for the game?

you can soon spend playing it.

[Toady One]

Yeah, some of those extra things were really excessive.  Those early planning phone calls were incredibly enthusiastic.

Christmas is in 13 or 14 weeks?  With my new 40 hour work week, and holiday travel, that might be cutting it close.  Let's see, I am now officially promising it will be released before  August 31st, 2006.  I'll try to improve on that as much as I can, and I'll keep posting the countdowns here as I finish things.

[Gezol]

Awesome. After the first release, do you think you'll keep working on it, or take a break from it and work on something else for a while?

(Thanks for posting the countdowns and answering all our questions, by the way. I really appreciate it, tantalizing though it is...)

[Toady One]

There are some other things I definitely want to put in (and I suspect certain people will be angry if I don't do it, since we enthusiastically discussed it on IRC).  So the idea now is to get the core game out, then do enhancements occasionally, much like a regular old roguelike.  It's like having another Armok, LCS, etc. but that's fine.

That said, I have about 10 other smaller scale projects waiting to be written, or sitting around half-written.  I'd also like to put some of these out.  Like a lot of my other games, even if the implementation is crappy, there are lots of interesting ideas.

[Kinghy]

Ooh! Ooh! Release it on my Birthday (August 28th). It will make everyone else very sad and me very happy and so it's a great idea.

[Gezol]

Ten smaller-scale projects? Any chance you could reveal a bit about some of them, or are they all going to be surprises?

By the way, based on some stuff Toady has said, I think I may have figured out what one of the big core feature easter eggs is. I could be completely wrong, but I'm not going to share my guess here. If I'm right, it's insanely awesome and I can definitely see why he wants it to be a surprise. We'll see when it comes out, I guess...

[Toady One]

Well, I say "about 10" because they merge in and out of each other...  some stuff in space, the one with the random 80s song generator (Toady One sings!)...  a kind of forest spirit thingy...  and some really really trashy stuff.  If you've played the Sub Games, you know how trashy it can be.

It would be funny if we collected everybody's guesses somewhere and compared them to what the actual eggs are at the end.  Maybe you can use the forum's private message option, if it still works.

[Aquillion]

Your dwarves are actually humans trapped in an advanced simulation, their bodies used to power their robot overlords and fed to themselves in a gross violation of the laws of thermodynamics!

Your dwarves were actually dead since the beginning of the game, and were ghosts all along!

Plump Helmet seeds are made of dwarves!