Been awhile since I updated. I'm just so damn excited about this I MUST update.

The GUI and GUI editor back end setup system, is just so ridiculously easy to use and so amazingly powerful in the scope of what you can do with it that I am dumbstruck. Completely overwhelmed.

I will say with absolute confidence that a mod team with even the tiniest scripting and modeling experience can rebuild our entire GUI from front to back in 3-4 hours. That's with importing there own art and geometry for it and building all new particle effects for the completely 3-d interface systems.

I was going to basicly lay out a tutorial of how to change the GUI and all the tools and so on but it would be really long, and a very small number of people would even get it and then there is the chance some aspect of its execution may still be further optimized and simplified so I won't go into it.

I am just super excited about how cool it is, I guess. Its always nice to see pre-planning and long term work goals pay off with things falling into place just as you expected but this situation is just about the total personification of that idea.

The game is going fabulous actually. Were going into the finalization and cleanup stage where all the core elements and content are done and are just being tweaked out and improved where we see the ability to improve it. That's nice. Playing in all the arenas and with game types the beta testers don't have yet is refreshing. It seems kind of surreal to consider how fast the game will be finished. Of course I can't say anything but from the look of things right now its real nice to know its so close. And a little scary to think were that close to letting it go for everyone to experience.

For most of us this will be our first commercial product and spending so much time with these ideas and the content as almost exclusively your property makes it a little freaky to consider how people are going to react and relate to it.

I am confident we are going to surprise nearly everyone with how good the whole game is when finished.

I find myself surprised a little every now and then like today. If not only due to the fact the majority of the games development was carried out by only 3 people and that as a whole the game still only comprised 6 content contributors total for the whole thing. 2 programmers 2 artists and 2 animators one of which also contributed heavily to the sound work. Now there is the music and the guy doing the pilot portraits to think of as well but they are not in office employees. I don't like counting them as separate entities but they both have there own things going as well as there contributions to this project. Saul has made a lot of contributions in taking a lot of the more time consuming elements off our hands with managing a lot of the website and taking the time to do all those interviews.

You get excited about doing an interview for like the first one. Then when you do the second one and your like, "But these are all nearly exactly the same questions as the last interview I did, didn't you read that?". You decide maybe interviews are not as cool as you had imagined. So its no small task answering the same questions 20 times in what you hope can be a new and interesting way each time.

And David I think has done a great job creating more fun and inspired pilot photos than the ones we had which were more realistic, but a lot more drab. He really put those together in a hurry and has been great about corrections and working out the visuals of them without a proofing or concept stage. I personally find that impressive. When your confident enough about your ability to go ahead and rough something out with little to no corrections before it finished. I personally still put most creations through 3 phases minimum.

I am looking forward to seeing the new batches. He put a style together for those pilot photos which I think really captured something of the games feel. The images are lighthearted and still cool, but they don't belittle the combat aspect of what your doing. I don't get the feeling from them that this image does not reflect the look of someone with the ability to kick some ass. I don't know if he got to play the game before he did them but if he did them without ever playing the game then that's even more impressive.

Well Rolling along I guess I will wrap this one up.

I am still very excited about how the game is coming along and I think you guys should be too.

Your going to get something truly unique and satisfying when this title hits the shelves.