Good fairings dwellers of the gaming universe, and may I first and foremost offer another apology for the consistent lack of, erm, consistency in our 'weekly' update which admittedly is entirely down to a combination of a recurred addiction to being terrible at Quake Live and that most constructive of all hobbies, beer. Still the great soaring monstrous entity that is Floating Point Studios continues on its journey to thoroughly possess the gamerverse with wondrous gaming acumen and things are drawing to an epic crescendo with our first game Flight ready to burst into life like a gigantic all-consuming airborne gaming eagle. All the game content is completely finished but as per usual a few last minute issues are postponing things somewhat. Jules is currently wrestling with the bird weighting system which for some reason is not allowing the birds to be rendered in game. After exponentially upping the rate of coffee consumption in the office, the problem has been located and it is now simply a matter of rearranging some elements of the game code and the weighting system opening wide the sweet road to release, bringing equilibrium once again to FPS towers.
The Flight music has been also been finalised this week with the addition of some ambient sounds and some instrument volume alterations. We have also added more suitable effect sequences for capturing clouds which should now blend much more effectively into the various soundtracks for each level. The importance of sound has been impressed upon more and more frequently during the development process - there are various elements which a game experience consists of and sound is no less important than any of them as the association of visual and audio components is essentially what a game experience consists of. This realisation will influence our future gaming endeavors to a high degree and we will look closely at incorporating highly dynamic and interactive audio elements into all our games.
Rich has alongside doing some fantastic concept work on village props for our next game The Elder been redoing the sky boxes for Flight to fit more aesthetically so these are now totally done. These conceptual designs are essential to the development process so it's a good thing Rich is a fantastic artist with a very diverse and methodical approach to his work. Andrea has been faithfully working away at our level layouts for the Elder which are at the stage of allowing us to look at the basic underlying framework of the game as a whole - from this we can then begin the process of arranging each level and segment of the game in a more structurally complete form. Andreas work here has been fantastic, concise and accurate to our original designs.
Take care out there, thank you for all your patience and look out for the swiftly approaching beauty that is Flight!
