So, what have I been doing lately? (I hear nobody in particular ask)

Well, mainly I have been at work(real work) working on the game I am developing for them. But in my free time (~6 hours each night Monday->Friday and most of the day Saturday and Sunday),
I have been working on Morning's Wrath.

(When is Morning's Wrath gonna be fricken done!?) I hear you say.
Hopefully soon, here are a list of potential excuses reasons as to why it isn't already done.

Games take a LONG time to make

A very core member is swamped by college

Real-Life Work is keeping me busy

Games take a LONG time to make!!

So what all have I been doing with the time I have on MW?

Cleaned up the workspace and data directory(needed it)

Put a nice coat of pollish on the first quater of the game

Tuning the game engine for performance and reducing memory footprint

Fixing lots and lots of bugs

Modeling, Animating and Rendering graphics

Writing/Revising dialogue

Ensuring the story is coming across properly

Working to implement the save-game feature(not easy)

In reality, Real-Life work takes a lot out of me, it is hard to do game development for 8 hours, and then come home to do MORE game development; So because of that, Saturday and Sunday are the big-work days, which is good, since I can(and ususaly do) dedicate the whole day to it(9am to 2am on saturday, 9 am to 12pm - 4pm to 8pm on sunday).

Any other good news? Sure there is =)

Adam Frechette, our composer, is working on THE LAST piece of music for Morning's Wrath, it is The Morning's Wrath theme, and so far it is sounding awesome.

Aaron Brown, our sound designer, has had the game's sound effects finished since about November, so we are all set on that front.

Morgan Chaput, our concept artist, has finished all of the in-game hand-drawn inventory item icons, he also did the artwork for the intro cinematic, and our box art and concept art.

Jenna Hoffstein, our character modeler, has finished all of the character models and texturing (now i just have to animate and render them =D)

Zac Todd, our designer, has finished 90% of all the game scripting, once college is out things should once again be pumping on his end.

All of our testers, did very well with our first beta session, identifying bugs and giving feature requests, and are looking forward to our next beta session, which is coming in May.

Voice Tallent, at this point is still up in the air, given the amount of dialogue in MW it is fixing to be a logistics nightmare, as far as casting and recording are concerned, also the use of 'relatively(they arn't professional)' unskilled voice actors, may yeild a lesser experience rather than a greater one. Once Zac is back in action we will make the final decision as to weather we will have voice in MW, since it is not a trival exercise and could easily decide the fate of MW.

So, as you can see (I hope you can see at least), we are nearing the end of the road; there is still PLENTY of work to be done, but we are plugging along. If you count engine development(2001 to 2003 plus this last year (march 2004 to march 2005) then Morning's Wrath has been in development for Three Years however, this isn't exceptionaly uncommon, especialy for adventure games(which, along with RPGs, tend to be the most resource intensive games to create), I was recently reading that the most recent Myst game, took about three years to produce, and was with a dedicated full-time team with proper funding;

We however, are FIVE people, with jobs/school, working to create somthing amazing, with all of the odds against us, and even though it is taking a long time, damnit...

WE ARE GOING TO DO IT!

*catches breath*
so there is the 'offical' update as to where the MW project currently is, hopefully noone has lost faith in us, we are doing the best we can, hang in there =)