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(A Snapshot of the Blog)

Our last couple months have been taken up with a big push to get the last major portions of R&D, engine development and Tool creation to a point where there was little risk to any publisher looking at a ground breaking game like Citadel of Sorcery. This also involved building a demo of the game play. This is because we have been talking to various publishers and arranging demonstrations for the upcoming weeks. However, we have now reached the season of holidays, and that makes scheduling meetings just that much more difficult. To avoid all the holiday mania, we are now scheduling our future (or ongoing) meetings in January and February. Unfortunately, this pushes out any news of actually signing with one of these publishers until that period, but due to the holidays, it just cannot be helped.

As for the development of the game, lots of progress has been made! The single biggest area of visual improvement has been the Level Designers making use of the A.I. net. The world is very much alive now with NPCs living their lives, going to work, getting off, going home for dinner, going out to on the town for fun, etc. At night they get in bed and go to sleep, sit down the next morning for breakfast, etc. The complexity of a fully dynamic NPC population doing what they want when they want, has, of course, come with bugs. Toward this end NPC monitoring and reporting systems have been added that log any abnormalities, and allow a Level Designer to see exactly which NPC, where, and in what state, choose what action to take that was questionable. A simple double click on the issue and it takes the L.D. right to the source of the trouble in the world. This has allowed us to cut the errors in the Citadel (where we are testing all these systems) down from hundreds to (as of this morning, zero). Every NPC (hundreds of them) is now working quite well, and this system will allows us to iron out any issues with future NPC A.I. populations in newly developed areas, quickly, and with a minimal of fuss .......

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