It's been a while since our last news post, so here are some brief updates. First, you may have noticed that we recently switched over our forums to phpBB3.0. Many thanks to Matt Gallivan for taking charge and making that transition. Matt has also finished updating our custom forum skin to match phpBB3, so in a short while you should see that skin as our default forum theme once again.

Our team has been somewhat hypocritical over the last few years, as we continue to say in our message that we really emphasize the story of this game, yet we've shown no actions to back it up since releasing the prologue on the site so long ago. We have been working on the story, its just been very slow since it's low priority during this initial development phase. But tonight, we've made available chapter 1 of the Allacrost story. Its up in the story section of our website, or you can download the PDF right here. I'd like to personally extend my thanks to Brian Aloisi for taking my writing and really making it shine. He has really taught me a lot about writing in the little time that he's been with the team.

Finally, a general status update about how the game is going. Unfortunately, we've made very slow progress in the past two months. This is primarily because we are now very under-staffed. All of our most committed, senior developers have had things happen in their lives this year that has inhibited them from contributing as much as they would like to (this goes for myself as well). We're also short in the art department, as usual. Music and sound as always is fully staffed and is pumping out more material than we know what to do with (but this is a good problem to have). So having said that, we are in somewhat of a crisis right now and we really, really need new programmers and artists on our team to help us keep Allacrost going strong.

If you are a programmer, right now we're looking for people experienced in C++ who are excited about writing game logic. This means writing map exploration logic, code for smooth battle execution, party management and shopping interfaces via our custom GUI system, and more. We also strongly need at least one programmer with OpenGL experience to help improve that GUI system, as well as giving a perfection polish to our text rendering code and adding support for special visual effects such as dynamic lighting for use in our next release. We'd also like to have a couple more programmers working on our game editor, which is shaping up to be a pretty darn nice tool now. So game logic, the graphics engine, and our game editor are the three primary areas that we need more programmers in right now.

Before I begin, if you have had difficulties getting the 0.2.1 demo release to run on your Windows PC, please read the comments I posted in the release announcement on our main site. A solution for that problem is presented in there.

Now that we've finished our third release, its time we share with you all what our next steps will be. Our previous releases have been tech demos, meant more to show off what we were shaping up Allacrost to be rather than to be something that was fun and enjoyable. Well those days are now gone, as demo 0.2.1 marked the end of our series of tech demos. Our next goal will be to create a complete game demo that we hope our players will enjoy playing. This version number for this next demo is 1.0.0, and it will be the last demo that our team produces. After demo 1.0.0 is released, our team will finally be fully prepared to begin creating the full game.

You may be wondering why we continue to bother with all these demo releases rather than going straight to work on the game itself, and there are several reasons for this. Many people on this team, including myself, have never developed a game before, or even a professional software application. These demos allow us to gain experience and mature our technology so that by the time development on the full game begins, we are all well prepared for the challenges ahead. Another reason is to allow you, the player, the opportunity to sample Allacrost without waiting for years. In the long-term perspective of Allacrost, spending time on creating these demos will be well worth the temporary distraction from the main game.

Demo 1.0.0 will be a major leap forward from 0.2.1 in terms of both features and content. Progress towards demo 1.0.0 had already begun months ago with the re-designs of our graphics and audio engines, which were originally intended to be done only after 0.2.1 was released (this was also the reason why 0.2.1 was released much later than we had hoped). Here is a list of the major features and content that you can expect to see available in demo 1.0.0.

Tonight, we are proud to release to you Hero of Allacrost - Demo 0.2.1. Windows, OS X, and Linux/source packages are available on Sourceforge, and you can expect Debian and FreeBSD releases to follow shortly thereafter. As always, download and installation instructions are available on site's download page right here. For those of you who don't know or just forgot, our intention on this release was to improve upon our last one in small but appreciable ways. There is very little new content, as this was mostly a code development release. We kept you all in the dark about what features we were planning for this release, and I'm happy to say that all of the features that we planned are now implemented in the game, along with a couple of extras. In no particular order, the new features in this demo include:

- You may now have multiple characters in your party, and hence in battles
- Support for saving and loading the game has been added
- Game settings (display, audio, key and joystick mappings) are now saved and restored automatically
- Treasure chests have been added to maps
- The ability to run in map mode is now active, along with a stamina bar that depletes while running
- The menu layout for battles has been improved
- The shopping interface has been vastly upgraded, and now sports a new "shopping cart" like functionality
- Upon entering a map, an introductory text and location graphic are displayed briefly
- We now support interactive dialogues in maps (e.g., you can select a response in specific conversations)
- Various updates to the party menu screen
- Audio playback quality has been improved greatly

The biggest changes in this release are "under the hood" in the game's engine, which we have written from scratch. Although you likely won't be able to notice most of these engine changes, these changes were absolutely necessary and make the lives of our programmers much better (and more productive). One noticable effect of the engine work is the audio playback, which is improved because we now use a newly written audio engine that uses the OpenAL library to playback sound, rather than the less powerful SDL_mixer library that we've used in previous releases.

There's been a few important developments here in the last week that I felt we should share. First some good news. The most critical and difficult-to-find bug in our video engine has now been resolved. This was the last major barrier to overcome before we could make our next release. Now we have to complete the following:

* Fix a few more minor bugs in the engine
* Polish off a couple of the new features we have added
* Adjustments to the map scripts and game content

It is just a matter of finishing all of these small and relatively easy tasks. If you're interested in helping us test our pre-release build, make sure that you are registered on the forums and an e-mail will be sent out when we reach that stage.

The second piece of news involves recruitment. We've added a few more programmers to the team in the last six weeks so we're not entirely understaffed in that department now. We had a meeting this weekend and decided that ideally, we could use three more programmers to work on the graphics engine, map exploration code, and game editor areas. We're also still interested in getting a 3D modeler/animator on our team if you're in that area of work.

The last and most important news item is a design decision that we must make. We have a critical problem with our battle artwork requirements: they are simply too high for us to continue along our current path. We've proposed and debated 3 solutions to this problem:

1) Generate 3D models and animations for the characters' battle sprites, and translate those animations from 3D into 2D for use in the game.

2) Re-use our map sprites for battles in place of separate battle sprites, and have battles take place on the maps themselves rather than on a battle background

3) Keep everything in battle mode as it is currently, but replace the battle sprites with enlarged map sprites.

There are of course many benefits and downsides to each approach. We have a thread on our forums which you can find here where our community is actively discussing which approach we should choose to take (you have to have a registered account on the forums in order to view this particular thread). The outcome of this decision will no doubt affect the design and gameplay of Allacrost, so we encourage you to voice your opinion about what you personally think is the best option.

Our progress has been a little slower so far this month, but we're far from a stand still. There have been several very difficult-to-fix bugs in the new video engine code that have been slowing a lot of us down (especially myself). Hopefully within the next week or two, we'll have everything patched up and ready for prime time. Our map editor has been making some great progress though, thanks largely to gorzuate. We do intend to begin making public releases of our map editor sometime in the near future once we have a couple more features available in there, and we hope that will attract more people who are interested in helping out with editor development. I personally hope that our editor can become on-par with the editor for StarCraft, as the SC editor really helped to boost that game's popularity.

Anyway, artwork has been making some nice progress as well, even though many of our artists are inactive right now. Most of the artwork focus lately has been on map sprites, including new non-standard (non-walking) animations. They haven't been yet added to the game (because I've been spending all my time fixing engine bugs), but hopefully we'll be able to squeeze a couple of them into our next release. There's also been a revived focus in story and writing ever since we hired Brian to be a writer a few weeks back. He and I have been working together on both the main story and having a nice mini-story for our subsequent demo releases.

Except for these outstanding engine bugs, code-wise I'd say that we are pretty much ready to make our next release. Last I checked, all of the primary features we had planned for this next release are implemented and fully functional. There are also several additional features that we've managed to squeeze in as well. One feature that we have been working on but will not be in the next release is internationalization support. So perhaps within the next month or two, we may become interested in attracting some translators on this team. Speaking of which, we're still looking for a few programmers to join us. We have a few new programmers on our team (3-4 I think) since our last post, but we could still use a couple more.

The past month has seen several important developments. The largest improvement was done in the code for the game's engine (specifically, our audio and video engines). The good news is that this new code is designed much better than before, making it more flexible for us to use and easier to add new features. So effectively, it is great progress for us in the long-term. The bad news is that engine development does not really gain us any short-term progress, so the next release continues to be delayed as a result. But this engine development would have to have been done later if not sooner, so its not so bad.

We've been seeing a good amount of progress in artwork lately, which is very nice. Some of the new artwork that's been created will likely make it into the next release as well. Some music has also been composed, as well as some people stopping by on the forums and contributing sound effects and artwork, which has been much appreciated. So in summary, I would say the progress of the past four weeks has been fairly steady.

Which brings me to my next point: we need more programmers on our staff. Currently, we have 7 staff-level and 4 contributor-level programmers on the team. 3 of the staff and 3 of the contributors are on what we call "downtime", meaning they can not work on Allacrost for an extended period of time due to personal reasons. So we really only have 5 programmers total who are working on Allacrost right now. We are really looking for staff programmers, not contributors. We need people who are able to make a regular, stead commitment to helping this game along, rather than those who just help out when they have free time. If you are interested, head over to the Contribute page and fill out a staff application for a programming position. I would also recommend that you view the Coding Needs page on our wiki, as it lists all the major areas of our code base and which ones are in need of a programmer to actively attend to them. Also you may wish to view our Bug tracker, as it not only lists bugs, but also specific development tasks. To view all of the coding development tasks, you can login anonymously, click on "View Issues", and then from the Filters box near the top right of the screen select "Code - Feature to Text". That should give you a darn good idea of the kinds of things we need to hire people to do, and in what areas of the code we need new programmers the most right now.

I'm trying to do a public update at least once a month to keep people apprised of what is going on with this project. So here's an overview of what's been going on lately.

We've hit a couple bumps with our development team in the past month. A couple of our key programmers were away, which really slowed us down. But the good news is that they are both back in action and making good progress again. We've also had some headaches due to our audio engine, which we've completely re-written using OpenAL instead of SDL_mixer. The reason for this switch is that OpenAL provides better playback quality and more features than SDL_mixer; I and others on the team have already confirmed that the game sounds much better after this switch. This engine is still undergoing some birthing pains, and fixing all the bugs and problems in it have taken up a significant amount of our time.

Originally we (especially myself) were hoping that we could get our next release out sometime this month (August), but it doesn't look like its going to happen. We really aren't too far from being release-ready, as all the major feature additions, save for one, are either complete or on the verge of completion. We ended up spending a lot more of our time working on some of the back end/engine code than we planned this period. Although you won't directly see the results from that type of work when ou play the game, these improvements that we have done ameliorate the process of expanding upon what is available in the game. Anyway, we are still working on getting this next demo out, but since many people on the team are back to school soon we're not sure how much progress we're going to be making.

Finally I wanted to give a mention of a major design change that our team is deliberating on. After releasing the last demo, we realized that our battle system pretty much consisted of "select an action, select a target, repeat". Now many RPGs have used this general formula in the past, but it just feels a little boring and it doesn't make our game very unique in that aspect. We've been brainstorming on an improved version of our battle system that we hope to be much more engaging to the player. The major premise we're thinking of here is to be able to put characters in battle into either melee or support modes. Support mode characters stay in the rear casting spells and such, while melee units engage an enemy by running up to it and remaining in close proximity to it. In other words, the characters would not continually stay in a line on one side of the screen (FF-style), but rather move around the battlefield as they fight their way through enemy lines. There's still a lot to figure out, but we think we may be on to something somewhat unique and fun here. We have a public discussion about these ideas on our forums beginning here if you'd like to chip in, but to view this particular thread you have to be a registered forum member. And just so that it is clear, the next release will not see any of these major design changes in the battle system, but the one after that very likely will. :)

Its been over one month since our last release so we owe you an update on how things are progressing. Overall, progress toward meeting our next release goal has gone extremely well this period. Particularly on the programming front, we've made a number of large improvements to our engine which have been invaluable in enabling us to develop the next set of features we want to have in our next demo. Several of those features are already fully or partially implemented and can be seen by checking out a copy of the game from the SVN repository. The release of demo 0.2.1 is largely dependent on the progress of the programming team, as we will not have very much new audio or visual media available in this release. As a rough prediction, I'd say that we now have well over half of the code written that is needed for our next release.

As far as our recruitment of new members goes, we've made a number of new additions to our team so far. They include three programmers, a sound composer, a team manager, a web developer, and a writer. We're still seeking more programmers, especially those that are interested in working on our game's editor, which really needs the extra help. Sadly, we haven't been able to add any new artists onto our team in the past month, which is extremely disappointing. We desperately need help in the art department, otherwise it is assured that our future releases will be held up due to a lack of artwork. If you're interested in helping us out, please send in an application and let us know.

In other news, both our main website and our forums are undergoing a number of functional and cosmetic changes at the moment. Therefore, there may be small periods of time where either one of these services is temporarily inaccessible, so bare with us. Thanks to our new manager, Gallivan, our forum is finally receiving its own custom-made skin to fit with the theme of our website, so go check it out.

We had a team meeting this weekend where we all got together to discuss issues related to the release of our latest demo, and more importantly to decide on our future goals and direction. Compared to our first release, the code base of our second release is much more mature and easy to build upon. What this means is that unlike the first demo, it makes sense for us to continue building on our latest release since there's no heavy-duty construction going on in the code. And that is exactly what we have decided to do. From here on out, we're aiming to do smaller, more frequent releases than we have been.

Our next major team milestone is the release of a new demo, version 0.2.1, which will be a noticeably improved version of 0.2.0. We've absorbed a lot of feedback about the 0.2.0 demo, and the issues brought up by our players are what we will largely be addressing in this next release. We will be also adding new features in all major components of the game (map exploration, battles, etc.). As for what those features are or when we plan to have this new release available, we'd like to keep that a surprise this time around. The more help we get in response to our earlier recruitment hunt post, the sooner this release will become available to you. Thank you, everyone, for all of your kind praises and helpful criticisms of our latest release!

Now that our release is out, we would like for our development team would like to grow a little more. If you are interested, or know someone who may be interested in working in one of the positions as follows, click the "Contribute" tab near the top of the page to find out how to apply.

Programmers
All programmer applicants are required to have a moderate to advanced knowledge of C++. Knowledge of Lua is also beneficial, but it is not a requirement (you will likely come to learn the language as you work on our team). Any additional experience you have working with these libraries is a plus as well.

Programmers on our team are usually assigned to one, or sometimes a few, specific areas of the code. For example, the video engine or the map exploration code. However, our programmers often transition to new areas when one section of code becomes boring or over developed. With that said, we're looking to hire (# of) programmers in the following areas:

- (1) map exploration code
- (1) character management menu / shop menu code
- (1) battle execution code
- (1-2) video engine
- (1-3) game editor
- (1) system engine (internationalization, etc. engine functions)

We keep a concise "to do" list for our coding tasks in our wiki right here. I highly encourage you to look at this page if you're considering working with us and making sure you're up to working on the tasks that are listed there.

Artists
Since the very beginning, Allacrost has been in perpetual need of artists. As you can see, for an open source game our artwork is very high quality, and we plan to keep it that way. Artists who feel they are not skilled/talented enough to produce this level of artwork should still apply. We have a very culturing and nurturing artwork team here, and we help newcomers improve their skill. So please don't let any feelings of intimidation prevent you from applying.