Development has sped up considerably, thanks to our excellent and efficient animator, and truly talented programmers.

Sam has taken the group by absolute surprise, drilling out at least three to five animations a day! What was once an intimidating and daunting animation list, has been filled with plenty of ticks and smiley faces. Currently, the majority of puzzle-related animations, as well as necessities such as idle animations, walk and talk cycles, are all done, and being implemented by Aaron as I write this blog.

Also, our programmers sought to shoot down a few criticisms we received recently about how well we could pull off porting our engine of choice (Sludge) to the iPad as desired. There have been a few doubts as this open-source engine has not yet achieved such a goal. Thankfully, Darcy had a fully rendered prototype running on the iPad 1 within two days! What would we do without him….

The user interface is currently being refined; we are trying to minimise as much UI space as possible. We are considering everything from the inventory, to the possible use of a ‘verb coin’, to a cursor design for the PC prototype. I have been working many late nights to ensure it is also highly readable and intuitive.

Finally, our backgrounds are most impressive, thanks to Paco. He has nearly finished the first room, give a few polishes and addition of room-fiilling assets. He should be moving onto the second room soon. The colours are sensational!

The team is quite excited to receive feedback for the script from Paul Callaghan tomorrow. Fingers crossed!