Good Heavens, it only feels like a microsecond since I wrote last week’s Mondoid and, if I’m honest, that one was a bit of a struggle. Yep that’s right, it’s Binky again. I’m sorry.

It’s been a bit of a “stuff’s been happening but it’s all a bit behind the scenes”-y this week, which unfortunately means it’s a little bit tricky to go into much depth and I’m pretty much screwed in terms of finding an appropriate image to use for the blog header. Hence this one.

crafty edit: Er, totally forgot about this until Will mentioned it to me but *cough* for some actual useful information, you might want to have a squizz at the thread about the upcoming build, 27 here.

Tease #1

Romain is hard at work developing an in-game multiplayer server interface, so that you’ll be able to find public servers easily and also get a little bit of info about them before you attempt to connect, such as whether it’s an open server, how many players are connected – that sort of thing. We’ll go into more depth next Mondoid by which point it might be ready to release, although this will need to get tested thoroughly before we release it so delays are possible.

Tease #2

Work continues on the ol’ map expansion. The zombie density map has been produced for a fairly sizeable new region which includes the part with the mall in it. Quite how much of this new region will be in the next map update remains to be seen and there’s still no fixed date on exactly when it will be released. But it’s getting closer, step by step.

Tease #3

There’s been a fair bit of discussion on The Indie Stone and Steam forums about possibilities in character customisation now that we’ve got real-time 3D models in-game. We hope to get the 3D models into the character creation screens reasonably soon, so that it’s not necessary to squint and use a magnifying glass in order to decide what your character looks like. Also, the topic of much discussion was the possibility of visible backpacks.

This is something we’d definitely like to add and although it seems entirely cosmetic, there are gameplay reasons why it would be nice, certainly in multiplayer where you might want to “liberate” the backpack from another player – a backpackless character almost certainly carries little of value and might therefore be somewhat more safe wandering about (apart from all the zombies, obv).

This, and more clothing variation is something which I’m going to spend the next few weeks working on since for too long have you had just the choice of vest or sweater, trousers or skirt (if you’re female). We’ve got lovely big clothing stores in the new mall and it’d be a bit rubbish if all they stocked were the same sweaters. We’re also keen to enable female clothing on males and vice versa since, well, why not? More clothing types also means that we can start implementing more clothing effects (currently limited to “sweater makes you hot, vest cools you down”). Practical clothing choices in terms of minimising scratches is an important yet currently horribly under-developed aspect of the game.

The bit at the end where we plug stuff

I’ll end this Mondoid with a plug for SockThuggery’s “Mighty Tactical Shooter“. We played it at this year’s Rezzed and thought it was flupping brilliant although it did lead to one of the more awkward experiences of the year when we decided to head over to the Game Jam section in order to attract the attention of ‘The Mighty Git‘ (that’s the Twitter name of the designer / programmer – I’m not being outrageously insulting) and failing miserably.

We ended up standing on the perimeter like lemons while every now and then the other half of SockThuggery, @Pipsissiwa, glanced up presumably getting increasingly freaked out that some weirdos were staring at them constantly. Eventually we let out an embarrased cough, waited until they weren’t looking, and ran off.

So anyway, their game is terrific and there’ll be a Kickstarter for it soon – but in the meantime, why not pop over to their Greenlight page, check out the vids, and consider clicking on that big friendly “yes” button?