DI MONTHLY #7: It's all coming together...

HOUGH I'M PROGRESSING SO HARDDDDDD

Well that was fucking scary, wasn't it? I certainly soiled my pants. Though that wasn't because I got spooked by a ghostly ghoul, that was just because I felt like it.

We're now deep into fall and getting closer to winter, but just because it's getting cold outside and most creatures of my kind would head to hibernation right about now doesn't mean that we'll be slowing down. If anything, it's the complete opposite. We'll just keep falling more.

Gaming???

We teased our next game all the way back in June, when the sun shined and the birds sang and didn't fall from trees encased in solid ice blocks. The announcement was supposed to happen soon, but it didn't. But fret not because we're still not announcing it! Wait…

Yeah, the game still isn't in a state where we feel comfortable showing it off yet. But we're doing pretty steady progress now. Radium is getting pretty production-ready at this point, and the amount of missing engine features is consistently diminishing. I was showing off bits of the game to other developers yesterday, and so far the reaction seems good. But we need just a bit more time to tweak it, we're still working on the aerial maneuvers (this is a pun but it won't make sense to you yet) and getting the game to a state where it will look cool on the announcement day.

The news are nearby though, so stay tuned for that (again pun intended but you won't get it), the real schmeat of the game isn't far away. This time I promise it, and you can come and draw crude words on my front door if that doesn't come to pass.

EVEN MORE GAMING???

Yes, really! Well, maybe.

Cascadence, a small game jam project we released last month, has been received really well. Like, REALLY well. Like the kind of well that Little Timmy would be proud to fall into.

As a result, we're considering making an extended DX version of it for Steam and Switch and other cool sounding S-word platforms (Sitch.io?) as a little stopgap release. No promises on this part yet, since releasing commercial games is surprisingly difficult and expensive, but if you'd like to see and more importantly give us your hard-earned cash in exchange for receiving more puzzle guzzling goodness, we'd like to hear from you!

So send us replies on social media, mail at contact@distantillusions.com or join our forums to beg for it when they're out. It's a community thing to get some games out.

The Wacky Wild GameMaker Library Open Sourcing Bonanza

We really like open source code, since it's very easy to ste–, er, study for our own purposes. As such, we decided to open source some of our GameMaker libraries we've used to develop Operius DX, Cascadence and some other games we've made in the past.

This includes a finite state machine implementation, a timer system for scheduling and delaying function executions, a seeded, deterministic RNG system, and a collection of easing functions that are used everywhere in our games. These have proven to be very useful to us over the years, so we might as well share the knowhow.

You can download them… right now! From this link, over on our GitHub: Get that shit!

Forum

Yeah, yeah, it's about the gazillionth time we mention it here in the newsletter, but this time I mean it. Pinky promise. The forum is REALLY close to being opened. Mors did some frontend work on it, and it's looking pretty spiffy. We still need to make sure that every part of it is in working order, and there is a LOT of frontend, so it's not out yet. Nevertheless, have a teaserific image of it:

You know what, fuck it, have another one.

These are from our dev server, so you won't see this serval on our forums when they open. Sorry. I'm sure I will make a thread for that though.

Anyway, the forums are going to open up pretty soon, so keep an eye out on our social media so that you can register as soon as possible and have a cool early adopter timestamp on your profile. The only reason it isn't out yet is because work on it got put on pause to make some progress on our next game (woah exciting and you definitely didn't already read about it)

New S letter

Check this out:

Cool, huh? Anyway, we're changing up the way newsletters are delivered. Previously, newsletters were sent to subscribers a week ahead of time, then made available to the rest sometime in the middle of the month. This is no longer the case, as you may be able to surmise from the fact that you are reading this on our site right now. If you aren't, then uh, ignore the previous sentence.

Newsletter subscribers will still get email updates, and more importantly an exclusive goodie bag, so subscribing is still a good idea and really cool and makes you a handsome and more desirable person, but now you won't miss out on posts if you happen to subscribe, say, right now.

Conclusion

That's a lot of words for a kind of slow month.

Some of the stuff we've done over the past few weeks has been rad as hell, and I'm very excited to get them all out. It'll be a really explosive end to the year. As always, please follow us on whatever social media you want to use (I personally hope it's not X though) to hear from us as soon as new cool shit goes down. It'll be awesome and you will definitely regret it forever if you miss out on it. It will haunt your dreams. See you next month!

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