Hey, as you may have just read ... Grim Earth has reached its Beta : D
I've finished the last section of the game (!) and played through the whole thing, title screen to title screen (!!) ... there's no placeholder art and everything worked (!!!)
It really feels like a different game all of a sudden, I can now see it as a whole, a complete entity. It's suddenly obvious what needs to been improved, added, subtracted, and what just needs leaving alone.
This means I can now develop the game as a series of polishing passes. Start with the obvious stuff, and use finer and finer grains until it's done. For example, I just updated the clouds on all levels (based on a new technique I used for the end levels) and everything suddenly looks 14.3% better.
It's going to be a few weeks yet, but from past experience I know the game will just say to me one day ... 'I'm done!' ... although I have a bunch of stuff in mind for the updates ; )
Thanks!
George