Okay, so. I suck at updating this here thing, I think that has been made perfectly clear over the course of this time.

Anyway! The Release Candidate was just released privately. What does this mean? This means that the release is creeping very, very close. If you want a more precise indication, unless there’s any really horrible bugs that somehow pop up from absolutely nowhere, expect Seal Hunter to be released within the next week. I’m sorry I’ve been so bloody slow in developing this, but life in general has kept me awfully busy – and it is well known that all programmers are lazy.

So there you have it – expect some multiplayer seal hunting goodness to hit the ‘net in a week’s time or so. And on a final unrelated note, we totally won the Gamer’s Choice award with Eggnappers at SGA2010 as well! Thanks a lot to everybody who voted for us.

See you online very soon!

So. In case any of you were wondering on how to neglect a blog in the best way possible, this is how you do it!

The last few months have been hectic for me, including a frantic two week crunch for our school game project (featuring the game’s scripting engine exploding a week before the final presentation), traveling woes, my computer not doing what I tell it to, and Company of Heroes automatching. Yeah, I need a bit of fun on occasion, too. :(

Where does this leave Seal Hunter, though? As I’ve possibly mentioned earlier, the scoring system is truly the last little bit that goes into the game, and I’m still sorta waiting for a reply from the original developers on that particular detail (hi!). Not that receiving a reply would’ve mattered, anyway, as I’ve been insanely busy myself. :)

The statistics page is sorta-up, though (but not publicly accessible), and I’ve spent what little free time I’ve had to improve on that further. I really hope I’ll be able to properly release Seal Hunter this summer – it might not be in the most polished of states, but god damn it, you’ve waited long enough.

As I promised in the forums (you should totally go visit them), here’s the two game projects I’ve been working on across the last school year:

• Eggnappers – a party game for 2-4 players
• Dynasty of Zealots: A Legend’s Story – a singleplayer action-adventure game with ridiculously high system requirements

I’m greatly biased towards Eggnappers, myself, seeing as we had a lot more time to truly polish that one up. If you want to do me a great favour, go download Eggnappers and try it out with a friend or three. If you want to do me an even greater favour (and if you enjoyed the game, of course!), please click the Vote button beneath Gamer’s Choice, because winning the Gamer’s Choice award would be quite awesome indeed.

On that note, I’ll be attending the Swedish Game Awards Game Day Expo later on this week down in Stockholm. Come by our hope-to-be booth and say hi!

Another blog update that ended up being written all too late. Anybody surprised? Didn’t think so. :)

For all Russian players, I’d like to tell you about a new Russian fansite that has been finished up fairly recently – sealhunter.ru! If you’re one of those bear fighters from the east, you might wanna give it a gander.

While progress has been slow, I’ve spent most of what little free time I’ve had lately trying to iron out the last few not minor bugs left in the Beta, as well as streamlining most of the interface and menus. Optimistically speaking, we are relatively close to a public release. (At least I can promise it’ll be out before 2012, because, y’know, the world’s gonna end.)

What’s been keeping me busy, you ask? A school game project we’re polishing up before submitting it to the Swedish Game Awards, cleverly enough named Eggnappers (if you want to register an account and become a fan of our game, that’d be all kinds of nice of you, and it’ll help us more than you might think). In about a month I’ll be entering another game project, so yeah, my schedule has pretty darn hectic lately.

Regardless, I promise I’m truly making some progress on Seal Hunter – I suppose you could label me as a kind of a perfectionist, and I really don’t want to release a half-arsed game, because you guys deserve better. I’m sorry for taking so long, though, and for a lack of updates – I hope the finished game will make up for it.

And for a laugh, if anybody would be up for it – let’s have a Q&A session! Simply put, if you have any question related to Seal Hunter (the more complex the better!) ask it in the comments of this post and I’ll be sure to answer them all in a Q&A newspost later on!

…Please?

Sorry for being so darned quiet! I’ll try to better myself. Promise. Flog me into action, should that be broken.

Anyway – the Seal Hunter beta is progressing quite nicely at this point – so far there’s been a total of 12 major beta revisions released. A whole load of bugs has been ironed out, many features have been polished, and quite a bit of balance/stability testing has been done. Currently, what I’m trying to focus on is the balancing of three player games – it’s way harder than what is reasonable (I wouldn’t be surprised if the difficulty of this will force me to limit the game to a total of three participating players – technical issues contribute, too). To make matters worse, I’m in the process of adding a few new weapons, as well.

One of these new weapons would be the Carl Gustav – a high-tier recoilless rifle that packs a lot of raw power while lacking in splash damage. To make envisioning this weapon a bit easier, for $9500 you get a weapon that currently deals approximately 700 damage at its epicenter. It currently has somewhat of a support role, much akin to the AWP, but trading bullet penetration for area affect. It’s still very much beta material, so expect some tweaking to be done on it before the final release. (And maybe even get rid of my programmer art for it.)

Something that I had planned out for quite a long while and then suddenly ended up implementing on a whim was the addition of achievements. There’s 60 of them in the game as of this moment, and they’re all pretty ‘hardcore’ in the sense that many are kinda hard to actually earn. I’ll most likely end up extending the number of achievements even further before the final 1.0 release.

And to abuse the segue – the final release, while not exactly close, shouldn’t be crazy far away any longer. Keep in mind that I’m the only person doing the actual production and coding for Seal Hunter, and with school effectively keeping me busy from 7 to 7, working on SH isn’t my top priority. I am working on it; my time is just severely more limited nowadays.

Again, sorry for not keeping you updated as frequently as I’d like to. If you have any suggestions for future posts, please do tell – I’ll happily accommodate you!

Here’s a little treat for you non-beta people. Sorry about my accent and sounding so bloody nervous!