Thanks a ton, Dave (and my anonymous pm tester!). I'd love to get more people on board to give things a go so the game can have a good first impression when it goes live.

As far as progress goes, I built a shop for players to buy in-game items (with in-game currency, though real-money microtransactions are also available). I also have the game over screen up and running. I'll go ahead and take this opportunity to explain how some items work in the game;

There are 6 collectible items.

Small potion, does some healing

Large potion, more healing and can revive you upon death.

Shield, temporary invincibility

Crystal, used as a quest item, trading, and a few hidden uses that will come later

Queen key, used to open major doors in the game, can be earned through quests or purchased from a shop

Silver, in-game currency, is earned from making deliveries and through the storyline.

All other items go into one of your 4 inventory slots. These are deliveries, though occasionally they are delivered to a location instead of a person. You begin the game with one storage slot available in your bag. The others can be earned in-game or bought with real money. You'll also be earning increase in maximum health. You begin the game with 5hp (stamps).

Now you may wonder why there is health if this is not a battling rpg. Just like many games, the environment can cause damage and in Courier, it will be a big opponent. This shifts the gameplay to that of avoiding things and solving puzzles and removes the need for grinding for experience.

Things are going on-track for the May 24th closed beta. Once that beta has reached a sufficient point, the game will be open for playing completely free, though you are able to use real money for conveniences or help.

I hope you might be willing to share the game with your friends once it is out. I really believe it can become a strong showcase for what C2 can do.

Use anglelerp(a, b, x) instead for angles.

Edit - got ninja'd

Either a rectangle, a shader (would be more performance-demanding), or create a layer with transparency and a background color set. You would need to set transparent to No and then adjust the opacity. It may be neat to apply a shader to that layer, too.

Hmm I would have guessed it would have gone a bit more how I think of such things: Your idea is worthless without execution. Good ideas are EXTREMELY common. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Fantastic execution--that's the rarity and what is actually important.

It is also a little insulting, I suppose. The assumption that someone doing games all the time actually needs another thing to throw on the burner or that they really have the time to devote to someone else's mal-formed plan. Or, worse, that you think I'm incapable of coming up with an idea or that I don't have enough already.

Hmm maybe I do agree with the article writer.

That looks really cool! Great job!

So my current plan is for a closed beta starting on May 24th. I have some testers lined up, but I need more! Anyone interested in playing around with the closed beta, drop me a pm or reply in this thread. I'd love to get some feedback before it all goes fully live!

I think I have a decently large project going with Courier, though it isn't anywhere near complete (and is releasing progressively anyways, so that's irrelevant). I haven't had any problems with C2 other than occasional crashes from running previews too often. The only tough things are updating audio tracks as far as I've noticed. And there are a couple small quirks to making an adaptive soundtrack work. It also isn't quite as easy to do team work on the coding aspect of it all, but that isn't an issue for me.

If you are targeting a fully-2D finished product, I can't really find any reason NOT to use C2 unless there are some extremely different rendering things you find necessary. I'll be having a closed beta at the end of this month, so hopefully things pan out nicely.

I dunno, I'm really wary of anything Denis Dyack is involved with anymore. They (Silicon Knights, the company before this one) really blundered their last two projects and have had some very, very shady allegations quite often.

It's Music Time!

Courier features an adaptive soundtrack, which means it seamlessly flows between different music based on where you are or what is happening. Here is the music for the outdoor portions of the first town, Pinesboro.

Pinesboro Theme

I don't use a large, formal design document, but I do have documents that are used for reference. Like I have a big excel chart that tells me what every coordinate is in my arrays. It also has a list of all quests and which NPCs are involved. I have a flow chart for story progression, too. I draw out some maps, some puzzles, and a few other things. But a ore-planned design document? No.

I'm having trouble with this, too. There's a large amount of speech in my game and I set a single text object's text based on events. With the new auto-complete, it substitutes automatically from my library of objects. This makes typing regular text nearly impossible without typing double letters and backspacing to get around the auto-complete. Perhaps have it disabled within "" in set text?

Updated the plugin with scaling, let me know what you think :)

I re-downloaded it again today and tossed it in to see what happens. Unfortunately, it still isn't placed properly. I realize its done through a modal, but it would be nice to be able to treat it like a sprite--ie, have it in the game world, properly z-ordered and scaled, and have it stay where it should with zooming. Building it into the game world like a billboard (in non-dishonest ways!) would be the holy grail, I believe.

Current action: it isn't placed correctly for me regardless of zoom level, it moves around when zooming, jumps a little in place during scrolling. In any case, no option puts the ad where I placed it in the editor. This is possibly because my game is largely played at about 80% zoom, but zooming to 100% doesn't fix it, either.

I'm not even all that worried about the z-ordering, since I would never want the ads obstructed by anything in my case, but the rest is quite important. I really hope to be able to use it some time!