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Don't worry, it'll still be coming out . It's just with this being my first game, and quite an ambitious one at that, I really had no idea of the timeframe this kind of project takes to reach completion. Certain rooms, scenes and characters are already in a near-finished, playable state, but at the moment it's a little disjoined as the story elements and transitions between events have yet to be fully intergrated into the game.

It's on hold temporarily while I catch up with the backlog of stuff I've got to get through after returning from vacation. Initial release estimates may have been waay off track, but rest, assured it hasn't been scrapped. If there's much in the way of further delays I'll probably get a demo fixed together and released in the interim, just to avoid "nice screens, shame about the vapourware" syndrome.

To be fair to the 'cubase sucks - fl studio rocks' guy, fl's definitely one of the more user-friendly ones. Provided you can click a few buttons and use a piano roll (don't be daunted, new people, it's really very easy to learn), you can get some great results. And due to it's heavy use of samples and softsynths, mixed down tracks come straight out of the prog sounding great, without having to worry too much about mastering afterwards.

I do find it a complete nightmare for overdubbing live instruments and vocals though, that's where sonar usually comes in

(EDIT: 'this post was automatically edited for "txt-style" spelling'. Oh, the shame )

Yeah, I've only caught a few episodes of lexx late nights on the sci-fi channel, but really liked what I saw, it manages to be fun and insanely inventive even on a shoestring budget. Of course, having Eva Habermann/Xenia Seeberg on board doesn't hurt either

Yeah, cool avvy, though it's starting to give me a strange urge to beat up a barful of thugs

I've heard about into the black, apparently Nathan Fillion even gave them a little extra funding for it (could that guy be any cooler?). Incidentally, I think a non-parody firefly adventure would be pretty shiny.

Sonar 5 Home : 74.99 GBP (around 100 euros) PC
Fruity Loops Studio Edition : 99 GBP (around 150 euros) PC

These are the two I use, and I can't recommend them highly enough. Sonar's best for live instrument recording and midi work, while FL studio's just superb for loop and sample-based stuff like dance, synth rock and trip-hop. Both also come with some quite excellent software synths (basically sampled or digitally-modelled instruments that work through MIDI, although you'll need to render track to wav/mp3/ogg to get the effect).

There's some good freeware soft synths out there too, like Triangle II and others, a quick google around should turn some up.

But if you have the cash to spare, there's some truly outstanding commercial synths like Slayer and QuadraSID (from ReFX) that are a match for most analogue gear. And a special mention for the Moog Modular V, which is as good a synth as you'll find anywhere (and costs it too ).

Hmm, that Buzz synth Exorph mentioned looks pretty quality too, must check that out

Same here, we only just found out two days ago that my grandfather has contracted cancer, and it looks like it's only going to be a matter of time.

Meh, Firefly ALL the gorram way!

But if I had to choose one, it'd be star wars. Although it's been spoofed quite a lot by now. Either one could work well really, as long as you avoid any of the really obvious gags that've been done a million times before.

On the bright side, even if it's only a fraction as good as superstar saga, it'll still be better than a lot of games out there.

Minor update with a couple of new screenshots. Really getting stuck into development now, as there's still no end of stuff to trawl though. It's times like these you start to regret having a one-man team

Yeah, quite a big Dwarf fan, especially the older series. Most of the 'nods' currently in the game weren't actually deliberate, until I stood back and noticed I had a ship called something-bug and the protagonist's dead best friend as a hologram, aiiiegh . So Cipher's being rewritten as a living, breathing crew member now, not least because I was kinda stuck with what to do with a holo that red dwarf hadn't done (and done better) before, and I couldn't make him a cyber, as another one joins the crew fairly shortly in, and it wouldn't really work.

I haven't actually played farenheit yet (though I've been dying to). About the only other sex scene in a mainstream game I could think of was in (the quite excellent) Mafia, though that was pretty brief.

Finally got a plot/story arc I'm happy with now anyway, and been keeping myself busy working on a massive amount of lineart for the first few scenes (new shots soon, once they're CG'ed). Most of the settings and narrative flow are in place now (at least in my head), I've just gotta work out a few more links between scenes in the intro and it'll just be a matter of getting it all done.

I know the demo's taking a while, but I wanted to give a good indication of the gameplay and style, and not just your typical quick "two rooms and a prayer" alpha test. At the current rate, the first release demo will be a beta version containing a good chunk (if not all) of the first episode. And once the script's refined enough, I'll start scouting around for voice talent. Provided, of course, that I can find someone game enough to play Cheri

Just had a go at the new demo myself, coming along very nicely there! Yup, couldn't get out of the room either (as I need an object to shift the *thing* under the *other thing*), but so far it looks pretty slick. A few minor typos here and there, but hey, it's just a beta demo after all, so no worries.

Look forward to seeing more from you as the game develops.

Aw, wish I could go, sounds cool. But on my student funds (zippo at the mo), it's not very likely, traipsing all the way over from Ireland

Ah well, at least I know what all that 'Mittens' stuff actually means now

Coolest chara EVER btw (Ben that is)

Mine comes from a song I wrote ("Sister Cheeba", which is occasionally used as my full nick elsewhere), which was in turn inspired by the Donnas song "everybody's smokin' cheeba" , which should give some idea of its meaning to anyone wondering

Aside from the obvious connotations, I just liked the way it sounds.

Time-wise, it's been a strain, yeah. The main "front standing" frame for an ingame chara usually takes about 20-30 minutes for a principal 'brainstorm' sketch (to settle on the basic look/build, jewellery/accessories and costume design), an hour for a refined inked sketch, and maybe another 2-3 hours for the colouring (although to be fair, a good portion of that time is spent deciding on the colour schemes for the chara). Full animation would take me the rest of my life, so for the conversation/interaction scenes the charas usually just have a static frame with 'talk' and 'blink' overlays, with cutaway and alternate angles here and there to take away the static feel. Where it's needed, animation is done using a mix of moving/scaling/rotating limbs, except where alternate frames are really needed (such as the case of hmm, bouncing bewbs or similar ), where they're drawn and coloured as individual sections and edited in place. I've played a lot of older commercial japanese anime games where charas do little more than blink and change expression occasionally, but I wanted a wee bit more than that. Backgrounds tend to take longer, as I'm not as well practiced and find it a real drag doing them, but still want to keep the layout interesting and not too generic.

As for cutscenes, I usually have one or another in mind mind for most of the day, thinking on camera angles, scripting tricks and shortcuts to get the point across with a minimal amount of resources. For example, when you first see the ship Shutterbug, it's crawling slowly across the screen, with an animated starfield in the BG blurring past, and alpha-blended speed/thrust lines blazing past the front of the camera at an ever faster rate. Coupled with some looped engine fx and a little bit of camera shake, it gives a fairly good illusion of speed without having to bog the filesize down with loads of extra frames or a pre-rendered animation.

And for people worrying about the sex getting in the way of the story, don't. In it's current state the game has one (quite lengthy) sex scene fairly early on, the rest of it's dedicated to the story and characters. It's highly unlikely to end up a 'sleep your way across the stars' kinda game, the sex in-game is more of a "look, it doesnt have to be a porno to have sex scenes" statement. I've played a few adult games before, and believe me, I'm taking care to avoid the common pitfalls there. Though luckily, most of them were so utterly, irredeemably awful that I'd be hard-pushed to do much worse

Hopefully soon, in the next week or two. Things are taking a bit longer than planned, it seems every time I complete some artwork, there's a whole other bunch of stuff that needs doing. It's still on the way tho

Heh, very droll there mate

I really couldn't be sure if it's just the screenshots being mis-represented, or my own monitor at fault, or something else. I guess I could have PM'd deftonesrule.

Well, it could just be a matter of contrast, and no problem with either the monitor settings or the game's brightness. Bear in mind that on a forum with bright background colours like this one, any dark images will appear very dark by comparison. But if you viewed them against a dark background (or fullscreen in the game itself) they'd look just fine.

Well, just a thought anyway.

Pretty much exactly right. It's just slang, and yeah, she's a sex-bot of sorts (or at least starts out that way when we first meet her).

Yep, well spotted on the Numan reference there. I thought it was a catchy title.

And though the game does have some explicit sex/hentai scenes, rest assured that it doesn't revolve entirely around it. I hope . And unlike quite a lot of hentai, it's gonna be very much consensual, none of that nasty 'forced' stuff.