As I'm sure you've noticed, I've missed the intended launch date for the level 50 update :( This is due to:
- The Easter events for both games taking up more of my time than previously planned. I basically couldn't make any progress on DF2 until Easter had already ended.
- The new mutations taking a lot more work than I thought. I correctly estimated the coding time, but failed to take into account how long it would take to manually place and adjust the mutations for all 27 enemy types. I also had some unexpected performance problems which took a fair bit of working around.
- The storyline has taken a bit longer to implement and test than planned as well as there is quite a lot fiddling required to get all 18,000 words correctly formatted and getting things like the timing of subtitles totally correct etc.
Here is where I'm up to:
- 40 New Weapons (including assault rifles) COMPLETE
- New Boss A COMPLETE
- New Boss B COMPLETE
- New Boss C COMPLETE
- New Boss D COMPLETE
- Crafting System COMPLETE
- Various bug fixes and optimisations COMPLETE
- New Zombie Variants COMPLETE
- Story Line Final Implementation 95% COMPLETE
- New Uniques, Skills, Items and miscellaneous code for level 50 (eta 2 weeks)
- Testing and Balancing (eta 2 weeks)
As you can see I've decided to increase the ETA on last two items from 1 week each, to 2 weeks each as I want to minimise the fallout that usually occurs after a big update. This new ETA will bring us to somewhere around June 20th.
Sorry to everyone who was looking forward to early May. I'm annoyed at myself because the early part of the update had gone really well. On the upside I'm pretty confident that there won't be any further unexpected delays as the rest of the work from here should be fairly straightforward (its pretty much just data entry).
I'll leave you with another little sneak peak of one of our many new types of basic infected :)
