The long due update

by pixza

“If all goes well, we hope to roll out our first round of beta invites in the last week of December. We aren’t going to commit to a date, but we will keep you posted of any progress/delay right here on this blog.”

So ended our previous post on this blog. That seems like a long time isn’t it! And since then, you sure haven’t heard from us here on this blog (though, we have been posting development updates on Facebook and Twitter)! So, here is a much overdue update on what has been holding us up!

First, we want to share with you some actual information about the game. We know we have been irratingly, stubbornly, frustatingly reticent about revealing the details of the game! But, that’s only because we were actively working on it, and most of the things that we tried with respect to the game play was experimental and was bound to change.

Okay, so here is some actual juice!

  • the game will be played by 2 teams, with upto 6-8 players on each team (yes, realtime)
  • will be using Facebook Connect (tied to your FB account but not a native FB application)
  • built purely on JavaScript – so no plugins required and can be played on any modern browser (see the next point)
  • IE support dropped – developing for Internet Explorer (which still does not support quite a lot of web standards that have been around for a long time in other browsers) was quite a challenging prospect for our 2-member team.

So, with that out of the way, why is it taking us so long? The short answer to that question is: we had to make some changes to the core game architecture – which made us rewrite our codebase about 3-4 times in the past three months. The good news though, is that it’s finally stable and the rest of the work should not be taking too long! Of course, it also goes without saying that what we are trying to achieve here is not trivial – achieving synchronization in a game with some 15 players is no mean feat (atleast not within the constraints of the browser)! Hopefully it will all be worth the wait!

We leave you with an unfiltered screenshot from the game!

screenshot1