PolyKhrome just got Unreal...

This is a brief but powerful update: Very soon, PolyKhrome will be an Unreal Engine 4 developer!

And we couldn't be more excited.  Stay tuned for more updates soon in Q2 2014.

Incoming Transmission...

Begin transmission...

Updates in progress...

- New project (Grimball, SeVer).
- New ground (Cyka).

- Bigger team.
- Refreshed developer.

Q2 2014.

Incoming message from Developer:

"...Ideas are becoming reality...the wait was worth it...soon, very soon..."

...End Transmission.

Life happens Life goes on.

Running a little behind on managing so many things at once.  But they're still going on.  Very much so.

Life just happens, and unbelievably-precise obstacles get in your way sometimes.  I've just have been having one problem after another, everything from a stupid computer issues to a cracked tooth, not to mention some truly personal issues, but I'm not here to list them.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I'm refining my demos, videos and assets some more, since there's more I can do with them.  I don't like to make schedules or guarantees, but yeah, my announced stuff will surface soon enough.  I'm working hard on them and I won't relax until it's all done and delivered well.

- Brian

Meh...Okay, here's some more about the Fantastic Five

Why not?  You guys are small enough rate of visitors to share it with.  ;)

In short:

• Project Coalescence is a full-featured true remeshing toolkit, designed to allow functions such as
• merging objects together with seamless topology
• Grease Pencil guide lines for guided remeshing
• a polygon grouping feature
• rapidly remeshing surfaces with even distribution of quads
• Blender's unique answer to "Dynamesh" (though, a Blender-unique solution that works very differently than ZBrush's Dynamesh but achieves a very similar result)
  
  
• Project Plasma is a full-featured rapid retopology toolkit, designed to allow functions such as
• auto-retopologizing meshes, with optional Grease Pencil control lines
• ghosted topology flow suggestions for manual retopology
• optional auto-bridging of disconnected edge loops
• organized tools for streamlined manual retopologizing
• all rapid retopology tools being available during Sculpt Mode (allows for less retopo work when some of it is already done during the sculpting phase)
  
  
• Project Threads is a full-featured clothing creation toolkit, designed to allow functions such as
• sewing clothes with real-time physics
• organized tools for applying effects to clothing such as destructive (burns, tears, etc.) and additive (stains, wrinkling, etc.) effects
• clothes sculpting tools (allows quick creation of clothes on models using Sculpt tools and readies the creation for manipulation with the clothing toolset)
• a fastener creator, to aid with creating zippers and other fasteners
• a pocket stitching tool
• a customizable clothing library of buttons, zippers, cuffs, collars and pre-made base clothing
• a mannequin creation setup assistant
  
  
• Project Kilauea is a full-featured terrain generation toolkit, designed to allow something functions such as
• real-time generation of terrain with presets
• organized tools for painting and export heightmaps
• automatic heightmap-from-mesh extraction and editing
• organized tools for ecosystem generation
• a terrain sculpting toolset
• terrain texturing with mask support
• adjustable erosion filters
• sculpting terrain with weight paint limits
• hopefully, vector displacement map support to allow erosion on overhanging and concave regions of the terrain
  
  
• Project Fluxus is a full-featured motion graphics toolkit, designed to allow functions such as
• a rich set of interactive and non-destructive motion effectors
• ready presets for dynamic particles that react to rigid-body and soft-body dynamics in real-time
• an animation director that allows you to edit their animations curves while they're running independently from each other--without need of directly touching the keyframes
• animated "dynamorphing" text effects that automatically remeshes the topology of distorting/morphing text objects with every animated frame as needed (to minimize stretching artifacts)
• full Cycles support, complete with presets for materials, lighting, node-based special effects and more

Now, again, this development is early, it isn't my primary development, but it is high on my list and I've already started with developing them.  The sooner I can have these tools for myself, the better.  Hopefully, I can get support with full-time development, so that these scripts will see production put in fast-forward.

But again, let me not get ahead of myself.  Now you know some of just what I'm doing during those quiet moments here.

- Brian

Not just developing games...

I just want to break some of the silence of what I'm doing behind-the-scenes in my developer life.  I'm not just developing a couple of games.  I'm also working on improving the tools I use for such game development everyday.

This is an early announcement, but I'm currently working on a set of five addons scripts for Blender.  Here's a rough summary of what I'm calling the Fantastic Five:

• Project Coalescence, a full-featured true remeshing toolkit.
  
• Project Plasma, a full-featured rapid retopology toolkit.
  
• Project Threads, a full-featured clothing creation toolkit.
  
• Project Kilauea, a full-featured terrain generation toolkit.
  
• Project Fluxus, a full-featured motion graphics toolkit.

They are as exciting as they sound.  I'm working on a set of scripts that will utilize all the latest advances of Blender 2.6, integrate them to work together as seamlessly as possible, and push them farther than they've ever been as tools, as well as feature plenty of original innovations.

I'm personally developing the tools I myself have longed need for streamlining game development.  I have heavy games I'm developing and I need heavy tools.  Even though I do own use other tools to complement Blender, having a streamlined one-stop shop for most of my work will prove most invaluable.

When I'm done with it, Blender will be a tool highly-optimized for streamline game development and animation   I'll outline my Fantastic Five in more detail in another post later.  I might even produce a design document to invite other developers to aid my development.

Naturally, as I do have several other projects I'm working on all at once, this will take some time to do.  Right now, SeVer is my top priority.  But if demand proves high enough, I can set it higher as a priority (even though it's already pretty high as a priority).

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  One step at a time.  Today, an introduction.  These are what I'm working on, in addition to my games.

- Brian

Incoming!

Hey, folks.  A mess load of updates are coming.  The past couple of months have been quiet, but it hasn't been because work has slowed down with me.  On the contrary, I've been working on more than I can handle over the past couple of months.  I just haven't taken much time out for updates, and some things I simply didn't want to share yet.  But now, it's about time I shared some of it.

Development on Cyka is still coming along.  I'm making a new Indie DB page for Cyka, which will feature most of my increasing development news.  I find that it's easier maintaining an Indie DB page than a blog, and plus it puts me right where my audience is.  I have so much about it I want to reveal, and I'm confident about the success of my planned Kickstarter (which I'm holding off on, just until more development is done).  This thing is growing bigger in development than I originally had in mind, and it's turned into such an involved development, I only want to debut much of it on my Indie DB page.  Impression is powerful, after all.

An example terrain scene for the smaller project, SeVer (WIP)

In addition to my Indie DB page for Cyka, I'm also working on one for another smaller project I've been working on, called Se\/er.  This title is a short-story RPG title which is like a 3D cross between Super Metroid and Final Fantasy and blends platforming exploration with action role-playing journey.  It will play as a nice contrast to Cyka, which is a large-scale game that is a new kind of blend between RTS and MMORPG.

In fact, this smaller project Se\/er has been what I paused a while on Cyka to work on, since it is what will help fuel my Cyka development.  While I've been doing this, I've been working on everything myself (concept, programming, writing, assets creation, music--the works), so my blog suffered a bit as a priority,  My blog site's in need of a much-needed redesign as well, which I've been putting off a while.  But when I get enough development done, a site redesign be my top priority.

On another note, I'm finishing a tutorial series I started, which I plan to use series to bring interest to my game development.  And I've opened a new YouTube channel called PolyKrafter for a set of videos called the PolyKraft series, dedicated to showing the kind of workflow behind PolyKhrome productions.  It's a series of videos designed to help developers with some solutions towards AAA indie game development. When I'm done with some production on it, I'll share more about it.

I want to add that I'm doing some freelance work, which naturally cuts into my dev time.  So I've had my hands full with a lot of stuff.  I'm looking to support myself with development of Se\/er and Cyka full-time and the sales of my game-ready assets, but until then, I've got to freelance along side my developments.

That's all for the moment.  Thanks for visiting this blog!

- Brian

Creating Blue River Canyon with Brian Lockett (Part One)

First of three videos covering my workflow for making a simple mid-poly "green canyon," using Blender and limited settings in World Machine 2.  Since I'm using Blender and since World Machine 2 has a free Basic Edition, anyone can try what I show here.  I used a mouse in this just to show it can be done.  All assets in the corresponding source files are released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.  And the second video is in production.  Just thought I'd share it here, since it will be game-related by the third video, where we convert this terrain usable as a game scene for the Unity game engine.

- Brian

Updates In A Nutshell

It's been far too long since my last update, but never fear--I haven't stopped a thing about my production with this game.  It's been an interesting few past months for me personally, to say the least.  I didn't intend to stay away from my blog and development for so long, but hey, some things in life just can't be helped.

Anyways, here's a briefing of updates, since I don't want to spend a whole lot of time with the updates here:

• I'm working on a three-part series tutorial on creating a canyon with Blender and World Machine 2.  I've completed the first video.  (I'll post the video here after this post.)
• Cyka is still in active production, but due to being such a big project and until I get a reliable dev team assembled, it's taken a back seat to a smaller project.  Now my main focus is a small indie game called Se\/er.
• I didn't make the 2013 IGF deadline this time, but I'm sure aiming for 2014 IGF.
• From now on, I'm going with a "underpromise, overdeliver" philosophy with my updates.  Simple and short.

See you next time.

- Brian

Working to enter demo into 2013 IGF

Processing...

The title's pretty self-explanatory--I'm working on the Cyka demo to enter it in the upcoming 2013 Indie Games Festival.  That's actually why I've been kinda silent lately--I've haven't had time to update my blog like I should.  I've got a lot of work ahead to do in just a comparatively short time to meet the IGF deadline, but I've got a lot of work done, too.  I don't have time to make snapshots or comfortable enough producing a half-working demo just yet.  I still plan to release one as soon as I can, though.  My plans keep changing (well, life keeps changing them for me), but hey, life goes on.  Later.

- Brian

Technical difficulties @_@

Not an actual picture of my situation...yet.

It's been a crazy past month, but I've finally got my computer back to seemingly functional order.  It got infected by some kind of malware that even Malwarebytes couldn't even detect. It took me about a month of trying to search through all my files to detect the problem, and eventually, I just had to save what I could to an external hard drive, start my computer all over again, and re-install all my programs and settings.   And yes, it takes a month to do that!  One frustrating month.

Anyways, even though my computer's crashed twice since I've done this complete re-install of everything (and I'm not quite sure as to the exact nature of those crashes yet--whether they're related to my previous problem or something else completely coincidental), I think it's working well enough to resume my work here again.  Right off the back, I can show you some of the assets I've been creating, and in a very cool way.  (I've been waiting a while to finally use this--just click on the cube icons to start the interactive viewers.)



Here's another one (one I've had for a while now).



Expect more of these.  Play around with them.  Have a blast.  (Also expect some web browser applications posted here soon enough.)

Onward to other news:

• My new website for my game assets and custom assets division for PolyKhrome, Powerhouse Game Assets, is now open to previewing, though it's still in development and being updated.  This will help PolyKhrome generate revenue to go towards the game development, and, well, until the Kickstarter is started.
• I'm still building my team, and it's just a matter of finding time to organize that time.
• I'm organizing my Cyka assets to throw together a demo, to whet some appetites out there.  That's still going well, and pretty soon (for the millionth time, I know), I'm drawing closer to my goal of a Cyka Kickstarter.
• I'm working on a side game project designed to be a casual game--again, for revenue.  But it's still fun.  And it'll be some reduced in scope and size and of a different style of gameplay than Cyka.  A little refresher to cleanse my palette of Cyka from time to time.

Anyways, thanks for hanging with me, and for the 1,000+ views thus far (and think--I haven't even promoted this site very much yet!).

- Brian

Update: Good progress (with one setback), Linux and OUYA

Powerhouse is almost finished!

Hey, folks.  It's been a while, but it's been quite a busy while for PolyKhrome.  I've got a lot of assets created for the Cyka demo, some development video of me making these assets almost ready to share, and I've got some of the basic framework for the gameplay up and going, and I will show them...as soon as I can remove the vicious malware that's plaguing my computer.  -__-" {Of course!}

Yep, my PC's sick.  I'm writing this post with my netbook, which thankfully I still have, and all of my files seems to be okay on my infected computer (that is, when I can log in long enough to see them before the computer totally freezes up).  I'm running every reliable malware scanner I can find.  As I've got over 800 GB worth of occupied hard drive to deep-scan through, and my computer begins to freeze up after about 30 minutes or so, it's taking a while to do this via a series of smaller custom scans.  Anyways, when this minor setback is over, I'll compile my work done so far and post up a preview demo of, well, my demo.  Demo of a demo.  Funny.

But that's not all I've been doing all month of July--I've also been working on the Powerhouse Game Assets website, which is relocating and almost ready for business.  The picture above is from my tiny netbook, so it's truncated a bit there.  Selling game assets will greatly help with Cyka development (some people make up to $100K a year selling assets!), so it's been a top priority for me, as well as this demo.

Some other good news is that since Steam will be supporting Linux pretty soon, expect Cyka: Steamed Edition for Linux as well as Windows and Mac.  Also, I'm involved in a couple other side projects, including a Community Game project being lead by Peripheral Games (my iOS game idea won the contest they were holding), working on the development of a game clothes creator program, as well as producing a fan-created animation for my previous engagement of Operation Moogle--all of which I'm using to bring more attention to Cyka.

Cyka will come to OUYA.

And finally, I thought about it for a while, and I finally decided that PolyKhrome will put Cyka on the Android-based OUYA when the game is finished by next year, even with some exclusive content.  It's a risky console to support, but it's something I think might be worth the chance (and for $99, the price of that chance isn't too bad at all).  I still have some questions about OUYA, like how are they going to promote creative quality games away from an inevitable sea of mediocre unambitious games and shovelware.  But, in any case, Linux fans are really growing in buying indie games right now, over 43,000 OUYA owners will be looking for games next year, and PolyKhrome really can't afford to miss this sweet opportunity, as risky as it might be.  In fact, I am confident Cyka can be a big hit on OUYA--if it lives up to its potential.

Anyways, just wanted to check back here, just to let you all know that the game's development is still alive and well.  So stay with me, folks--we're progressing.  ;-)  (And I do mean a "we" pretty soon--I've got some prospect developers for Team PolyKhrome.)

- Brian

Update: What I'm doing right now?

Right now, I'm working on a larger demo that will feature three distinct terrain maps, with each one to specifically-tailored to showcase three of the most distinct and important aspects of the game.

Just for this demo, they run like different stages to select, though in the game, they'll be traversable seamlessly across one continuous world of terrains.  Each map in the final game will represent only a single region on a single continent.  For the demo, one map will specifically showcase the battle engine aspect, one will showcase the environment exploration aspect, and the last will show the resource-collecting/stronghold building aspect of the game.

Each of these will be important aspects that are stressed about this game, as this game will not only be a preview to those interested in seeing the biggest aspects of this game in action, but also as my biggest accompaniment to our Kickstarter (I feel that a mere video for this game is simply not enough--you need a good demo).

So far, I'd say it's about the demo is about 40% done, and I'm looking to get about 60 to 70% done by this time next week. Most of everything is not textured yet (I leave texturing last). Production will pick up in the next two weeks, as I work hard towards a checkpoint and as I'll be recruiting helpers pretty soon.

I'll confess that, though I have good experience in making games, everyday I grow from this process. This is indeed a learning process, as well as time to explore. Some things are second nature to me, while some other things are a whole new experience for me. Some things I'm finding I need to invent, as they're simply not out there, such as developing my blue grid in the game to conform to the form of the uneven terrain--that takes some problem-solving to think out.

I'm also preparing to employ my other service Powerhouse Game Assets next week. This is good, as I really want to get that rolling, too. If assets are sold, they'll be that much more help towards the production of Cyka.

It's not easy to be the director, the designer, the artist, the developer, the producer, all while striving to be the financier, being my own teacher about new things and being the promoter all at the same time, but it sure is one interesting experience, though one I'd be glad to share with other future PolyKhrome developers.

I have more to share later, but that's it for now.

- Brian

I just fixed my Wacom!

Succeeeeess!

Don't know how or why it worked, but I fooled around with my Wacom tablet some more and tried someone's "whodathunk" suggestion for getting it to work again and I got it working again.  I don't know if the fix will last or not, but I don't really care--it's working for now, and now I can paint my textures easier again!  This fix saves about $200-$300 for a new one.  Anyways, back to full speed with production!

Update: Some new screenshots and concept art

Yeah, this terrain is huge.

Hey, a brief update: Check out the Screenshots and Concept Art pages to see some new pics.  Their textures are not yet finished, so I just left them untextured for their showing just for now.  And please don't mind the funky placeholder textures of the green montane terrain and basic color of the canyon terrain--I'm still painting their textures and I don't want to show them just yet (hey, textures take time!), so I used the simple and crude in-game-engine texturing just to make it easier to see the Commander Cyka model.  More pics are on the way, and video showing my production of this is being compiled..

- Brian

Unity 4 is bringing changes to Unity and Cyka development

This is epic...

Unity 4 is coming out soon, and it's looking to be a real game-changer for Unity-developed games (such as Cyka).  Basically, thanks to Unity 4, not only will have characters in Cyka move a lot better in the game thanks to a new Mecanim feature, but now PolyKhrome can offer Linux gamers a standalone desktop version of Cyka (though, a platform-independent web browser version of the game is still planned), we can offer some optional DirectX 11 features for the PC version of Cyka, and we can provide some better shadow effects to the mobile versions of the game.

Jake "virt"Kaufman

I can even complete this game by myself now, if need be, thanks to the time-saving Mecanim feature and the further-improved updates to Unity, which is already the most streamlined workflow of any game engine around.  Though, I'd still love and plan to hire at least an animator, an environment artist, a character/prop artist, and another programmer, not to mention hopefully manage to gain Jake Kaufman for the music and assistance with sounds.

(By the way, if you've never heard of Jake Kaufman's work and don't know why I'm excited that I'll be inquiring him later on his soundtrack services, check his demo reel out and then please check this work out.  I'm a huge fan of his work, and I know that if I can get him (and he does seems to be pretty accessible), he'd definitely help bring out this game's awesomeness.  No guarantees, but we'll have to wait and see, and first get the game more together.)

Even though UDK is still technically more powerful than the Unity Engine, this next Unity release is going to be huge, and make Unity Engine even more a strong contender for indie game developers.  They own the Mecanim technology (they bought the small company who developed it for them) and it comes standard with Unity 4, which is something unlike anything other game engines really have right now (not even UDK, even with its robust animation system, has something quite like this).

Unity's parkour dude, running with Mecanim

Mecanim is a feature that allows you to use one animation you create for one model to be adjusted to other sorts of animated models, and have that animation adjust to the model and adjust smoothly between other animations.  It's just a fantastic feature and it's one that I've been watching them develop for a while.

It not only makes the characters look incredibly fluid with more natural motions in action, but it runs incredibly well on platforms without a heavy memory and processing cost (it runs even with mobile devices!), and most of time, it saves developers time.  Go here to watch a video to see Mecanim in effect.

There are so many goodies that Unity 4 now brings to the table that I will postpone the Cyka: Steamed Edition demo for Steam (developed with UDK) just to focus on fully utilizing Unity 4 for the standard non-Steam DRM-free cross-platform edition of Cyka (which would also save me from giving a whopping 25% of my Kickstarter funds just to Epic Games alone, just to use UDK at first).  I'm still making Cyka: Steamed Edition, because I still want a Steam-powered version for both PC and Mac.  But right now, Unity 4 really came at a great time, and I really want to give the main cross-platform desktop and mobile versions of Cyka my full attention with Unity 4.

- Brian

Sorry about the absence, folks!

My past two weeks in a nutshell...

Sorry for the long pause there (it's been almost two full weeks since I've last posted something here), but I've had to deal with some stuff.  Yeah, just stuff.  I've had to work with major Internet issues lately (like my Internet being off for almost a whole week and experiencing absolutely frustrating dropped signals when it's on), my Wacom graphics tablet is damaged and out of commission (I'll need to get a new one), and my computer's been strangely freezing and crashing a few times lately for no reason I can find (all to my greatest frustration).

But there's also been some good things that have caused a delay lately, chiefly with the news of Unity 4 coming soon, promising some features I've been waiting a long time for and that causes me to readjust plans (again).  Also, I'm finishing up the game design document (which was supposed to be finished like two months ago, I'll admit, but got pushed aside to production work), which will be provided to those who would be interested in joining Team PolyKhrome when I start recruiting.  And finally, besides just some more character models I'm working on, the demo itself really just needs some character animations, some more textures to complete the terrain, and enough game logic to present the basic gameplay mechanics, and it'll be done enough to display on Indie DB and polished enough provide for our Kickstarter (if all goes well with no more delays) sometime next month.

I'm preparing to upload some shots of stuff I've been working on for the time throughout the past two weeks.  And even though my graphics tablet is out of commission, I'm taking advantage of some other techniques to get as much of the job done as I can until I get another tablet as soon as possible.  But hopefully, aside from texturing, hopefully I won't need it too much for the completion of the demo.  I still want to get my Kickstarter going next month.  I never meant to be late with starting the Kickstarter for Cyka, but so unexpected delays have come my way, all I can do is adapt to them.  But some things have made the delays worth the wait, such as the news of the upcoming Unity 4, which I'll be talking about more in a separate post.

Anyways, that's all for this post.  I've got several more posts to do today, so I'll keep this one brief.  Thanks for checking back over the last two weeks, and sorry to keep you waiting.  But hopefully, from what I've got to show soon, you'll think it was well worth the wait.

- Brian

A new Games page added!

Check out our new Games page.  It shows the lineup of games we have coming from PolyKhrome (though, not in chronological order).  These games are why PolyKhrome was born.  These are titles we think will make PolyKhrome truly one of the best indie game developers around.  And a number of them, we'd like to have featured on the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, in addition to the currently-supported platforms that we are developing towards (PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and OnLive).  See any games that interest you?  After the completion of Cyka, the first episode of Deuces Wild! called Deuces Wild!: Jacks Are Better is our next game.  As PolyKhrome grows, so does our games.  We've got some nice games coming, if I do say so myself.  Of course, though, one game at a time!

- Brian

Update: Cyka model development screenshots

Commander Cyka in development

Check the Concept Art page for some first-look shots of the Commander Cyka model in development.  I'm just fooling around with head designs at the moment, and I'll post up more designs later.  The final design will eventually be textured, rigged, posed, and animated for the demo (which are the easier parts).  What you see here is far from finished.  So far, I plan to revise the bevor (the mouth area), I'm adjusting the eyes' shape and glow, sculpt finer details on the head, create some steam effects, baked the maps (normal, specular, glow, etc.), produce a low-poly model, and the upper torso is being finishing up.  No problem, though.

- Brian

For Developers: PolyKhrome introduces Powerhouse

If you're not an indie or hobbyist game developer, then you're not going to care about this one too much.  But if you are, then this might be of some interest to you.

We're opening a new page devoted to our game assets for sale.  It's going to be through a division called Powerhouse Game Assets (or simply Powerhouse).  This is just so we can focus our attention on our games here at PolyKhrome, and on our coming assets at Powerhouse.

The assets from Powerhouse will be developed with the indie game developer in mind, and as indie game developer, PolyKhrome knows a lot of those needs personally.  We make what we need (such as the clothes-modeling program I've been organizing, for instance) and we know that others will appreciate what we are and will be producing.

The assets will range from everything such as 3D models, environments, music, textures, scripts, detailed content packages and even full basic game starter packs.  And we're providing assets for many kinds of game engines, including Unity, UDK, CryEngine 3 SDK, and Spring RTS Engine.  2D game engines will be later supported.  The assets will be variously available in a number of asset marketplaces, such as the Unity Asset Store, Envato, TurboSquid, and 3DExport.

The majority of the content will be game-ready, and the prices for our assets will be priced with the indie developer in mind.  We'll even offer a royalty-based plan option that will be available when we begin with showcasing assets, because we know that sometimes you've got to start with nothing to make something.

The money we make from assets will go towards our own game development, and even some of the game assets from our own games will be made available as assets to use, typically provided with alternative textures in addition to the original textures.

As for the name, I like the name Powerhouse because it describes our we're going to be with our assets production.  I already have the kind of logo in mind for it.  And I think I just have a thing for ten-letter words that begin with P, has an H in the middle, and ends with E.

We're looking to have our first assets put up this week.  If you visit the site, please excuse the mess--we're building something here.

- Brian

Thanks for 600 views (and without even trying!)

We've reached over 600 views so far, and whether you're a repeating visitor or a new visitor, thank you!  This is a rather nice number of views considering that PolyKhrome hasn't even began to broadcast our game Cyka yet.  We plan to put the Cyka game and register PolyKhrome on Indie DB as soon as the playable demos are almost finished, and we suspect there will be a significant jump in attention from that.

But just the fact that you all who contributed to the 600+ views thus far, just on word-of-mouth or curiosity alone, it still pretty cool.  Having 600 views is not a lot in terms visitors of most bigger blogs, but for an upstarting indie game developer working on their currently unheard-of game, it does mean that at least 600 times, we've piqued someone's interest to come here.  We'll take it.

- Brian