As CSE’s time in crunch winds down and we bid a fond farewell to long days and occasional Saturdays, take-out/delivery food and lots and lots of items in Mantis, this week is ending on some very positive notes.  Last week were able to begin talking about Formation Crafting™ (albeit in its most basic form) and at the end of this week, our punch lists are looking rather small and puny. As development winded down we had a couple of rather common issues come up, the ever-popular slow memory leak and overall performance degradation. On Thursday, just as we thought we had looked down every back alleyway in the code, the team crited their perception roll and found a hidden passage that got us over those humps (and did so in style). While MoO on the PC runs at a fabulous frame-rate, the iPad versions have been steadily losing FPS as we’ve added more features, textures, effects, etc. to the game. With all the changes we made over the last few weeks our frame-rate is getting back to where it needs to be on the iPad.  The team has also been working diligently to decrease the overall memory footprint of the game as well as the download size and we’ve made a ton of headway (we’ve cut the downloaded size by more than 1/3).  Additionally, based on the end of the week testing by the team, we’ve squashed the one stability issue that was still bugging (sorry) us and now instead of being able to play through 95%-99% of the game (at one seating) without crashing, you can now play 100% without a hiccup.   So, it was a very good week and if all continues to go well over this weekend and early next week we will be submitting MoO to the App Store by week’s end.

As always, I am thrilled to be working with a small, independent team of very dedicated and hard-working guys and gals, many of whom had never worked in the games industry before. Even during crunch, everybody has stepped up and done what was asked of them, time and time again. No politics, no prima-donnas but just a bunch of people making a game of which they are very proud. And as proud of the game I am myself, I feel an even greater sense of pride in the team that we have built here and the effort that they have made on MoO.

Mark