No idea how I should name this post

Well, I guess I'll do this as game progress status report and personal life report all together?


Personal stuff:

Anyway, lets first get the ugly things out of the way.
Originally I wanted to get right back to working again after a couple of work free holidays.
That's when my mom called me, she's been in hospital the last couple days and... it looks like she's going to die soon...
The short version is:
She has blood cancer for more than 18 years now (with chemotherapy and everything that goes along with it). It's quite impressive that she made it this far, but it really looks like this is as far as things are going.

Of course I was well aware that this day might be coming soon.
But still...

At any rate, don't worry about me!
I've gone through a lot of worse things throughout my entire life (like almost everyone else does, right?).
So I'll be fine.

It's just a bit difficult for me to concentrate on programming, so stuff will take a bit longer than expected. But I'll do it, I can do it, and I will do it!
I'm also responsible for the webcomics script and stuff, and all of those things should be fine as well.

Since I'm driving to my parents place to visit her one last time, (~1000 km throughout the country) there's a chance that webcomic pages might be delayed by a day or two!
We should be able to pull it off to release them always on time.
But just so you guys know:
There "might" be delays!
In case there are delays, we will definitelly deliver those missing pages afterwards!

 I just figured I'll inform you about those"possible" delays and the reasons behind it.
(but as I said, we should be able to release them on time!)
And yes, don't worry, I'm fine!
I'm really grateful to have everyones support, and there really isn't anything I need right now.
Thank you very much, everyone!


Game Status:

I was able to program the basic combat stuff of the "test game" before Christmas.
All that's left to do is add some enemies (Cres already provided me with the graphics) and then add the random generation stuff.
Depending on how things are looking, I'll might throw this testing game out to the public sometime in january.
(I'm not sure about this though, maybe I'll do it, maybe not)

But please keep in mind, that this game just consists out of simple graphics and placeholder graphics.
As well as a lot of sketchy stuff.
It's pretty clear that this is a "test game", never intended to be a full-game.
The games main purpose is to figure some programming stuff out.
And it greatly helped me in understanding how dynamic lighting as well as random generation works.
(well, I haven't programmed random generation stuff yet! Just read a bunch of tutorials about it. It's the next point on my list of stuff I'm about to do, so as soon as I'm able to focus on this complicated stuff, I'll get to it right away!)

Hopefully we're able to get a lot more work done on the Sion and Medusa game in january.
That one will be a "full game", and we're intending to speed developement up as much as possible.
Originally I wanted to do a blogpost on some of the game mechanics I had in mind for that one.
But I'll get to that some other time.
It will mainly be a post about "how" I intend to use the random generation, and stuff like that.

Aside from that, I wish everyone of you a happy new year!
I hope each one of you guys and girls will have a wonderful new year, with a lot of good stuff that happens to you!

See ya in 2015!