Developer Diaries, chapter 7

[Aura]

A quietish week. Syureria joined dev team as character/CG artist, more text happened, act1 maybe gets a rework. Delta is doing something to the game code that i don't understand so i just write that he is doing...something. We are planning to release an actual demo (the alpha everyone has played was a dev tool for us), but it'll take some weeks or months, depending on how ambitious we are going to be regarding that.

We could use some editors, as in people who read the text and tell the writer that it sucks and offer helpful suggestions. A person should be able to form nice sentences in english, perhaps even write a bit himself, not afraid of confrontation and back up every bit of critique he has logically to do this job well. Contact people at forums or the irc channel.

Also, a path writer position (for Lilly) might be open. It's a lot of work, tens of thousands of words, but if you like to write and would be serious about it, why not?

[Aura]

The few recent threads about KS at /a/ had me thinking about the evolution this project has gone through, from January to this day. The initial genius idea of 4chan doing something productive is a mindboggling concept but surprisingly, /a/ had the follow through and a few days of holy shit posting in a sticky later, KS had forums. Those forums, foiling 4chan itself almost perfectly, were both awesome and terrible. The sheer creative volume and the mass of awesome ideas were soon overshadowed by retarded bickering and arguing, although to be fair, both should be used in moderation in any project. Eventually the drama and shrinking amount of regulars lead to the current kind of dev team that exists now. In retrospect, that was the obvious direction the project had to take (and that was one of the goals of the initial brainstorming phase), doing something like this as a hivemind/democracy is a hopeless effort. Still, much of the enjoyment in the early days came from the 50ish people posting their mind, and many concepts that still form the skeleton for the game come all the way from there. It's somekind of a dilemma between two heads thinking better than one and too many cooks spoiling the soup. At any rate, reading anons throw around silly suggestions and comments was refreshing, I even nicked a few good ideas that will appear in the actual game.

mood: relaxed

Edit: I edited out your smiley. Mods have broken powers.

[Aura]

The current developer alpha of KS broke 100 000 words written a few days ago, sort of a milestone i guess. Apart from that, the early part of the game is going through retouch and editing, currently I'm at about 20% done, not counting the game mechanics design that I'm leaving for later. More music and pictures have also come into existence and we even have a fanartist of sorts. The influx of wannabe editors is super, we just have to see what everyone is capable of, and again be careful of the too many cooks-syndrome.

Here is one of Nicol's latest: Stride (MP3)