Hi Jeremy,

We didn't look for other team members because we're trying to expand our product line with new stuff and the competition provides an easy excuse to try and develop one or two. Our graphics aren't great at the mo, we're just using them to get a feel for the maps and stuff... nearer the final deadline I'll be hounding my brother to make them look sweet. I'm not worrying about story line thankfully, Spirit is working all that over.

This deadline is a struggle I have to admit. I only just managed to get proper sprite movement and animation in at the weekend... was hoping to have at least half of it on the object manager, but I spent a disproportionate amount of time making the tile sprite editor. Once that was done, took me less than half a day to get sprites into the engine and all the little bugs ironed out. Its like the first deadline, I spent 2 weeks writing tools and 1 day putting the actual play engine together.

Now I have my enemy path finding code worked out (today is going to be a long day in the office on only 3 hours sleep :-( ), I've got to make more changes to the tools to accomodate the data I now need for that. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm spending more time on them than I am on the engine itself, which is a bit annoying given the tiny proportion of the final score that they represent. Still... I've learned a hell of a lot already, including how to break my own rules about how to write nice code in order to squeeze out excess clock cycles.