Steaming Ahead - WEEK 07

The seventh week of work since I got Steam Green-lit has come and gone. So as promised, here is a weekly update on the progress towards the Steam release of The Little Crane That Could.

Some good news: Again, I added two new levels this week, bringing the total to eight levels, which I think is enough for a first release of the game. I particularly like the last level, in which the Crane and the Bulldozer need to work together as a team. I think the veteran players of the mobile game will like how it turned out. I also made a big leap in quality for the simulation of the excavator. The bucket now interacts with the terrain a lot better.

Because some good strides have been made towards release, I now need to spend time on non-engineering tasks. I started to create a store-front for on Steam, and getting the artwork in place. For what is called the 'box-shot' I turned to what is my favorite rendering tool: Kerkythea. This renderer has good support by Wings3D, so I can setup the scene, and the camera in Wings3D, and have Kerkythea do a great photon-mapped rendering of it. Let me know what you think of it in the comments!

I tend to do most development on Ubuntu, with an occasional jump to OSX if I need to do profiling. But now I switched to using Visual Studio more, and have been dusting off the Microsoft Windows port. All this in preparation for the steam release of course, where Windows is the most important platform. For next week, I will work on integrating Steam's API into the game. I have already started reading the documentation on it.