Village the Game: Play it. Love it. Live it.

Here's what's been going on lately with Village both on game dev and business dev goals. This post is intended for those working on Village the Game directly but I wanted to see if other netizens had something to say about it.

• Jason found a web developer to donate time to VillagetheGame.com. Currently we're refining the specs for the new website and trying to schedule a meeting to make sure we're all on the same page.
• Anton just released a new version of Village on TGB. Geoff's buildings on the Warcraft II placeholder map are all in place. Now we're moving on to Nov 30th deliverables with a migration to NullSoft from InstallShield to see if that solves installation issues. Also we're migrating code to the subversion repository that Daniel set up for us on his server. I want to be able to checkout files that Anton and Daniel have checked in, run a build script and have the updated version running without having to reinstall constantly. Anton, Daniel let me know how hard this is.
  
• Geoff Castro's 2D buildings are done. He's sent me the source Painter and Photoshop files. So we can close the chapter on creating "Village Map".
  
• Jason is generating leads for accountants and lawyers to serve on the Board of Advisors for VillagetheGame.com
• Stanford really is a breeding ground for social enterprise. Just from hanging out with the Graduate Chrisitan Fellowship on campus, I've met two people very tied to social enterprise who can offer useful feedback on our simulation and I have learned a lot about how programs are structured here to incubate social enterprise projects. The MBA program looks even more promising after attending an information session today. They are even ramping up their entrepreneurial electives as well as their international requirements.
  
• Blake has finished most mods to the flash intro for the website. We're running into problems with streaming the mp3 file. It doesn't stream by default and takes forever to load without streaming. Hopefully we can resolve this soon. We're taking a lot of inspiration from the design of Ecomagination on this flash intro. Anton and I, in fact, talked about using this for art inspiration as well within the demo. It would be a big switch up, though so a new visual feel would really have to be worth it.
  
• Darian has refined further the specs for Village RTS. What I have to work on now is refining what specific visual changes of the map to trigger, and also what events or threshold values of the village economy will trigger them.
• The hunt for animators, level designers, sound designers, and musicians is going well. There some quality leads for each. The timelines they are telling me to get things done are sounding good as well.
• Darian has created a more specific story board for gameplay of the Nov 30th deliverable.
  
• Darian created a new Google Group today just for business infrastructure stuff so Anton and Daniel won't get flooded with messages and documents unrelated to building the demo. Sorry about that Anton, Daniel. If you look at the file or pages sections of Village RTS you'll see I cleaned it up a bit, too.

Much has been going on as you can see, and much is to be done.

Labels: achievements, status, villagthegame.com