Christmas Wallpaper!

Happy Holidays from us here at Califer Games!  Peter's whipped up a nice wallpaper of Miranda from Siphon Spirit fighting off a festive demon.

Krampus?

There's a bunch of different sizes for it at the media page, so head on over and get the size you want!  Other wallpapers are also available for those not in a holiday mood.

Indie Game Sneak Peek Report

We recently had an event where we could go and show the public games that we've been working on.  We had a great time there and found that the time passed all to quickly.  We saw a lot of interest in our games and we're happy that we got to go.  Usually when there is an indie get-together, either Jay Barnson or Greg Squire will do write-ups.  I didn't see either of them, so I figured I might as well do the write-up this time.  Here we go!

Magnetic by Nature

by

TripleSlash Studios

Magnetic by Nature is a game about magnets.  You play as a robot and aside from basic movement and a jump button, you have a attract button and a repulse button.  I had a lot of fun with this one, as there was a good sense of movement and momentum.  If I saw this on Steam's Greenlight I'd totally vote for it.  The screenshot above doesn't really do it justice because it's from the older XBox LIVE Indie Game version.  The current one looks better but I can't seem to find any screenshots of it!  They recently had a successful Kickstarter campaign and are working on the PC, Mac and Linux builds.  They are the ones that set up the event, so a big thanks to them!  

Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Company Site  |  Company Facebook  |  Kickstarter (Funded)  |  Buy on XBLIG

Siphon Spirit

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Califer Games

Hopefully it should be no surprise that we were showing Siphon Spirit.  For those of you new to this blog, Siphon Spirit is an action-puzzler where you use a holy orb to absorb and purify energy from smaller demonic orbs.  You need to be careful with your energy.  Getting hit by blasts or running into enemies will permanently decrease your energy.  You'll need that energy to defeat larger demonic orbs as well as cast spells.  Plenty of people enjoyed it, so we're excited.  We're hoping to have a Kickstarter set up soon so we can pay for music, voice acting, and porting to different systems.

Game Site  |  Company Site  |  Twitter  |  Blog  |  Windows Demo  |  Facebook

Spirits of Elduurn

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Califer Games

This was fun for me, as I hadn't played a version of it in a while and Peter's made some big changes and cleaned it up a lot.  This is a puzzle game where you control a light and dark spirit to destroy demons and create a world.  Spirits of Elduurn is going to be a free flash game which we will be using to promote Siphon Spirit.

Game Site  |  Company Site  |  Twitter  |  Blog  |  Facebook

March to the Moon

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Califer Games

March to the Moon is a fairly silly top-down shooter/RPG.  You stoically march forward, killing everything in your path as you try to solve the quest of rats in a cellar which gets out of hand quickly.  Soon after stopping the rat infestation you are fighting goblins, then aliens, then end up in a massive battle on the moon.  There are twelve different skillsets you can choose from, and you can learn two skillsets per character.  Want to be a Necromancer/Paladin?  Sure thing.

I didn't think that I'd be showing this one too much since it has already been out for a year, but a lot of people wanted to play it and really enjoyed it.  I may just dive back into the March to the Moon universe after our current projects are done.

Game Site  |  Company Site  |  Twitter  |  Blog  |  Buy on XBLIG  |  Facebook

Japanese Arena: Kana

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Califer Games

Japanese Arena: Kana is a game for learning how to write the two basic Japanese character sets.  It also has a few hundred words so that you have a reason to remember the characters.  It also has battles where you fight traditional Japanese monsters with traditional Japanese weapons and armor.  This got some good reception as well and I was able to figure out a few things I can do to make it better.  It's still really early on so there were some crashes but no one seemed to mind, thankfully.

                                                     Company Site  |  Twitter  |  Blog  |  Facebook

Momentum

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Projectile Entertainment

Momentum is a game where you use the controls to twist and rotate the path so that the ball can travel along it.  It looks great, but I didn't actually get a chance to play this one.  From what I did see, it's pretty hard.  Seems like half the time I looked over the ball was falling from the path.  Maybe it just takes some time to get used to (which is something that you don't really get at a show like this).

Company Site  |  Blog  |  Facebook

Halfling Wars

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Chondrostrike

Unfortunately, they'd already left by the time I got it into my head to do this.  I didn't get a chance to play it.  From talking around, it sounds like it's a fairly complicated game.  Stuff like RPGs or strategy games have a hard time at these kind of things where people want to just walk up and play something.  It's apparently pretty good since it was either a winner or a finalist for the Utah Game Wars.  I'll just have to let their pages do the talking for them.

Game Site  |  Twitter  |  Facebook  |  Kickstarter (Funded)

Disaster Mage

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Disaster Mage Team

Disaster Mage is a phone game where you need to use your wizard to shoot fireballs at the rocks falling towards the village.  It's fairly early still, and the screenshot above does not have final art.  They're planning on adding more enemy types as well as more spells to fight off the upcoming disaster.  Planned for Android and iOS.

Flame Warrior

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Eidolon Games

Flame Warrior is a space-faring combat and trading game.  I didn't see the trading, but the combat works mainly by momentum.  If you are in range of the enemy the ship will fire it's laser, and the opponents will do likewise.  Your job is to steer the ship by basically setting a waypoint and making sure that you don't send your ship into a bunch of other ships or an asteroid.  Peter played it a bit and I watched (we just kinda hoped all our stuff would still be at the table when we got back).

Blog

Equalize Math   

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Rainblade Studios

The best way to think of Equalize Math is to think of math Tetris.  Each row has a goal you need to hit and you can change whether the falling number is positive or negative.  To keep it from being too darn confusing there is a 'total' column as well so you know how far off you are from finishing the row.  It's been recently released on both iOS and Android.

Game Site  |  Buy on iTunes  |  Buy on Google Play

Untitled Co-Op

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Mount Olympus

First off, sorry if there are any artifacts in the image.  The file he sent me was massive so I rescaled it. As the missing title may have led you to believe, this is a co-op game.  One player plays as the girl, and the other plays as the boy.  They must get through a series of traps by helping each other to get all the coins and then get inside the tree.  The game doesn't look like the image above yet, but that's the plan.  I just want to know what's inside the tree to make it WORTH fighting through net guns, tenacious fireballs and who knows what else!

Twitter  |  Blog

Draw Space

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Alex Johnstone

I totally missed this one.  Their table was right across from ours, but by the time that I had gone through the other games in the U shape they had packed up and left.  I heard that it was more of a toy than a game.  If you want to know more, stop by their Facebook page and ask them what it's all about.

Facebook

Zen Boat & Side Effect

by

RegionSyx

I would have done these separately, but I can't find any images anywhere.  Zen Boat is a game where you draw a current on the screen with your finger to move the boat along.  It's pretty early still and I ran out of water, so I used the current to fling the poor boat off the screen.  Side Effect was a simple game where you tap a square and it changes the color of the surrounding squares.  Eric Hurst (the developer) correctly deduced that I had played a number of games with the exact same mechanics.

Twitter

Firefighter & A Game for Two

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Vince Betteridge

Darn it, another set of games that I can't find any images for. (Edit: Vince commented with a link to some screenshots)  Firefighter is a game where you are a firefighter and you need to go and save people.  There is also a cat that you can save as a bonus, but I had a hard time not getting the bonus because KITTY.  He's working on making the tutorial a little easier to understand and adding in challenges.  It was fun, but what I really enjoyed was his other game.

A Game for Two really threw me off.  When I saw that it was multiplayer, and that the controls were both on the keyboard I was kinda okay with that.  Then I saw that the movement keys were right next to each other (Player 1: A,D; Player 2: Z,C) and the jump keys were also right next to each other (Player 1: J; Player 2: U).  Vince told me I should get a stranger to play with me.  I'm actually pretty shy so I said I'd just write some notes for this post.  As I was scratching it out, he brought someone to team up with me.  After figuring out how we could both use the keys without cuddling, we got going.  And we had a BLAST.  This was probably my favorite game (that I didn't make) at the Sneak Peek.  If you've ever played Thomas Was Alone (Vince hadn't, to my surprise), this game was Thomas Wasn't Alone.  It played nearly identically, but with a multiplayer element that allowed you to get through puzzles faster than if you were playing single player and just switching between blocks.  It was only 3 levels long, but I really enjoyed it.

Company Page  |  Blog  |  Newgrounds

P.S. To the developers who attended: Sorry for getting this up so late.  Things were pretty crazy for me the last few days.  This took a lot longer than I thought, trying to find screenshots and company info.  If I do this again in the future I will ask participants to send me info.  Also, I went home with more pens than I came in with.  If you are missing a pen please email me the description and I will send you a hostage photo.

How to make a Siphon Spirit orb

When we first started working on Siphon Spirit we needed a way to show how much energy an orb had.  We decided to make it as a bunch of particles that would circle the core of the orb.  This led me to my first problem.  How was I going to modify the particles' position so that they went in a circle?  The answer was Trigonometry.

Pictured: Trig in action

Trigonometry?  Isn't that the thing that they made me learn in school for some reason but never showed me how it could actually be useful?  Yeah, that thing.  Since I never saw a use for it and it was just something I had to do for a required class I just remembered it long enough to take the test.

When I needed to modify the position of the orb I needed to change it's X and Y values.  In order to get a circle, I had to use both sin and cos.  

X = cos(t); Y = sin(t)

That's the (extremely) basic formula for a circle.  We need something to be the t variable.  We need something that will constantly and smoothly increase in size so that it continues along the Sine Wave.  Without an increasing number, the orb would just stay in the same place.  Time is a great tool for that, since it's always progressing. 

X = cos(time); Y = sin(time)

This is a step in the right direction, but it still needs work.  Not only is it going in little tiny circles, it's circling the 0,0 position on the screen instead of where the orb is!  Let's handle it not being in the correct position first.  When I make the particle, I can tell it what the position of its parent orb is.  Since X and Y are already being taken for the position of the specific particle, I'm using J and K for the X and Y of the parent orb.  We add those positions to the formula so that the particle will rotate around the center of the parent orb.

X = cos(time) + J; Y = sin(time) + K

That's better, but the more particles we add to an orb we see that they are all focused at the very center.  We need it to spread out so the whole thing is filled with particles.  For doing this, I decided to use the radius of the parent orb.  This helps make sure that the particles never go flying out of where the boundaries of the orb are, and that as the orb gets bigger the particles don't keep filling up at the center.  I do randomize it a bit so that the particles aren't all completely uniform.

X = radius * cos(time) + J; Y = radius * sin(time) + K

This gives us our final formula for updating the particles as they move around.  Mostly.  I also give each particle a randomized velocity (movement speed) based on the radius so that that's also not moving uniformly.  The velocity modifies the time to either make it faster or slower than other particles.  I also randomize how big each particle will be.  The effect that I want is that it's a flowing, living piece of magical energy.  Controlled entirely by trigonometry and a little bit of randomness.

So for all those like me who just couldn't see why anyone would care to learn trig, take another look at the orb below.  I couldn't have made it without trig.

Thanks, math!

Want to see the orbs in action?  Give the alpha demo of Siphon Spirit a try!  (Currently only for Windows.)

What is this creature?

Before I talk about what I've been up to, Peter's got something to show.

What is this creature?  Peter's told me that it definitely has something to do with the Siphon Spirit world.  Is it a friend of the Spirit from the demo?  A trickster demon?  An ancient sage?  Only time, (and maybe Peter) can tell.

I was sick today, so I had a little extra gaming time.  But mostly a lot of lying down time.  While I was playing Recettear (enjoying it so far), I started thinking about the blacksmith shop for one of the game ideas rattling in my head.  Usually I just keep playing, certain that I'll remember.  I rarely do.  Today I actually got up and grabbed the design notebook for the game in question.  I got all the ideas down, which lead me to a few more ideas.  After that, I was in an interesting state of mind, as I really started noticing the little things that make a big difference.  That led me to make more design notes.

While this is great for design, it's not that great for actually playing games.

Level Editor

A while back I mentioned that there was one last big screen that I needed to make for Siphon Spirit.  Well, I've gotten started on it.  It's a public level editor, so that users can create their own levels and share them with others.  I've basically just gotten started on it, but I can place all the orb types and have a detail bar that shows what it going to be placed and will have lots of other little details.

We actually already have a level editor.  It's very rough though.  It will just crash if you don't do things right.  You still need to know a lot of how to edit the level in the text file.  Plus it looks like crap since it's just the two of us using it.  I'm hoping that the new editor will be very user friendly and encourage people to make new levels.

-Califer

New Look For Siphon Spirit

I decided Siphon Spirit needs a new art style so I'm scrapping the last 3 years of work for this look.
And instead of defeating demons, you just hug them. I think more people will like it, what do you think?!
April 1 2013 ;)

How to Play, Part 2

Just wanted to go over what Peter said last week.   Hope this doesn't take too long to load, I wanted to try my hand at making animated gifs of gameplay.

First, go to the map and select a level to play.

Absorb orbs that are smaller than you.  This will make you bigger.

Orbs that are larger than you will absorb all your power.  Stay away or they will kill you!

Eaten by a demon.

Whatever you do, don't touch the demonic orbs.  Even if you're bigger they will hurt you and that energy is lost forever.

Ow, ow, ow.

Cast the Reveal Spell by pouring energy into it.  It's okay to touch spells, but be careful to not pour all your energy into a spell or you'll die.

A specter was hiding there all along!

Yep, time machine, alright.

Last Saturday I was able to get together with Peter and we finished up the last bits for the demo.  Except the audio.  Wait, why are we working on audio?  The purpose of the upcoming kickstarter is to pay for the audio.  Peter wants to get it all sounding at least decent so we don't drive people off.

But I did mention to him that it felt like a time machine to work on Siphon Spirit after I'd spent all this time coding up nice tools for future games.  He took me aside and booted up the earliest copies of Siphon Spirit that there were.  Now THAT was a blast from the past.  Looking at how it used to be and comparing it with how it is now.  Not only did I get to see some bugs that I have viciously squashed, but we got to see all the design changes we've made.  All of them seem to have been for the better!

As for the Japanese game (getting close to a name, maybe!), I wrote out the first lesson and showed it to my artist to get something better looking than what I had been using so I could figure out the placement of everything.  She got me something really nice and so I put it all together.  Below we have the previous lesson screen.

Perfection.

And underneath, but missing some character art, is the current version.  It's still got some changes to make, but it's much much better!

I'm nothing if not logical.

Life came up and bit me.

The astute of you may have noticed that I haven't really updated the blog in a month.  I have been rather busy, but not as busy with making games as I would have liked.  Peter probably could have said something, but he doesn't seem to like blogging.

It all started one Sunday when I came downstairs to feed the cat.  Carpet by the bathroom was wet.  I was annoyed at the cat, assuming that she had done it, but didn't have the time to really take care of it right then.  When I came back down I realized that the cat didn't have enough fluids in her little body to have made the mess, so I started wondering what was going on.  I soaked up the water as best I could, but in the evening we found that the water was back with a vengeance.  We had someone come out to figure it out and after a number of cuts in the wall he found a broken pipe behind our shower.  It was coming from our dishwasher and the sink, so the water was pretty dirty.  It had been going on long enough that it had soaked all beneath the bathroom all the way through to the carpet on the other side.

After we contacted insurance and had another company come out to look at tearing up the floor and replacing it we thought we were doing alright.  We just had to wait for the stars to align so that things would happen and things would get fixed.  (The broken pipe that was causing the flooding got fixed, but the mess it left behind is still there.)  Then, Tuesday last week my youngest child threw up all over me (and the dishes I had just washed) right after getting out of the bath.  I figured it was about time for me to take a shower so we got her cleaned up again.  She threw up three more times that night and I was on clean up patrol for each time.  I got to bed late, and woke up a lot during the night to check on her.  Our other daughter wasn't feeling well and was coughing in our bed all night long, which helped me wake up to go check on the younger.

So, Wednesday last week, I was very tired and figured it was about time I did another blog post.  Just as I was about to start my wife called and told me I needed to come home right away for and emergency.  After some prying, it turns out that ANOTHER pipe had broken.  This one wasn't a drain pipe and it was soaking the basement.  She managed to get the water shut off before I got there, but more than half the basement was sopping wet.  Having no water with two sick kids wasn't an option, so my wife took the girls to my parents house for the night while I stayed to clean up and wait for our handyman, who I was really hoping would be able to fix the leak so we could turn the water back on.

Thankfully, he was able to cap the pipe before the leak so we could turn the water back on.  The pipe had been installed wrong, so if he had just fixed the place where it was leaking it would just happen again.  In the end I was up until 1 in the morning soaking up water, moving things and pulling up the carpet to dry.  After that I had a well-deserved dinner and a shower and realized that I was working in the morning.  After 5 hours of sleep I was back up and getting ready for work.

Now that my excuses are out of the way, Peter tells me that we are very close to getting the demo done for Siphon Spirit.  He's given me more art so I can tidy up a few screens, and we're mainly down to audio issues now.  I'm looking forward to the kickstarter.  One thing we're going to do is introduce a smaller puzzle game that backers will get early access to the demo.  Peter will have just about all the art finished ahead of time so I can actually have things looking nice from the start.

The Japanese Game has also made progress (expect for a name, of course).  I've been adding mouse support since that makes much more sense to do things that way.  I just have four more screens to add it to, and of course I saved the hardest ones for last.  Even with all these problems, I think we should have two games ready for being shown off at Indie Game Night next week.

Here's hoping that we'll make enough money to help pay back what it's costing to fix my home...

Nearing the end of feature-complete

I'm working now on the part that I think is going to be the most difficult for the Japanese game.  Well, the second most difficult after getting a name that I'm happy with.  It's the actual flashcards.  I'm working on getting it so that I don't need to manually add answers for each kind of flashcard.  Okay, how many of you did I lose the second I brought up flashcards?  On the bright side, I plan to finish all the different flashcard types this week and finish off the battle screen.  Then all I need is the win/lose screen and the whole game is fully workable.

Peter's taking a little break and getting a mini-game set up for anyone who backs Siphon Spirit on Kickstarter.  It has the makings of a nice puzzle game, so I'm thinking about taking it further later on.

We're alive! WE'RE ALIVE!

Yeah, finally starting to feel a bit better!  Peter was feeling left out, so he decided to get sick for a day.  Then he sent me an image for the fifth level's cutscene.

It's time to leave the town and see what's going on with the army!  I finished converting the Siphon Spirit code into something much cleaner, and have been pretty happy with how few bugs have popped up.  Just got one that we've noticed so far, and it's just not calculating the score if there is an ending cutscene.  Easy fix.

The Japanese game is also coming along again now that I can focus long enough to get things done.  The battle screen is the most complicated screen in the game, so it's taking me some time to put it all together.  I have the basic attacks working and you can select an item to use to heal yourself now.  Next up is to actually heal yourself.  Then on to the special attacks.  Then on to actually filling in the flashcard data.

Okay, just think.  Focus.  I can do this.

THIS GAME IS HARD.

Being sick is going out of style

Yep, still sick.  At least I'm on the tail end of things so it should go smoothly now.

I didn't get much done on the battle screen.  I wasn't feeling very rushed and I was pretty tired.  Instead, I worked on Siphon Spirit.  I updated it to use my new screen manager code which has really helped clean things up.  Originally it was all just one big hodge-podge of code and it was a big mess.  Now, it's not quite working yet, but it's almost there.  The reason that I decided to change it all around it because we want to add a new screen to it.  An editor screen.  That's right, you'll be able to make your own levels!

It already has an editor built in, but that only is connected to the developer builds.  It's not very user-friendly. Peter has to remember a lot of button combinations and trigger and oscillation info.  And if you screw up it just crashes.  I think the only crash right now is if you forget to add the player orb.

Another Indie Game Night

I made the mistake of letting Peter talk to people, so now I've got more work to do on Siphon Spirit.  I'm working on making it so that the energy that you pull from different orbs will start out as the enemy color, but purify itself and turn white as it gets closer to you.  It also works the other way.  If you get too close to a heart that's bigger than you your white energy will turn red as it takes the energy away from you.  My favorite  orb for this is the Demonic Orb, since it turns the energy black, signifying that you will never see it again.

Peter's been showing me the art for the next cutscene, and it's looking really good.  I'm hoping we can get a demo sometime next month.  Then we'll start up the kickstarter campaign to pay for the music, voice acting, and maybe a custom font.

I got to show off the Japanese game during Indie Game Night as well, but since I don't have any real lessons and the battle system isn't in yet there wasn't a whole lot to show.  It was more like a tech demo than anything else.

But, looking back, I started with pretty much nothing just two months ago, and I spent a good chunk of time on March to the Moon, so I feel fairly comfortable claiming that I can get it all fully working within the next two months.  Not full of all the content, but fully working.  Wish me luck!

Okay, for real this time!

I should have known that nothing would be as easy as I had hoped it would be.  I finally got everything set up so I can sell stuff on my own site and got it activated and everything.  It took a few days longer than I had hoped, which makes me a bit sad.  On the bright side, I'll finally be able to sell March to the Moon!  I'm aiming for Friday morning so I can have a chance to send out information and keys to gaming news sites and hopefully I'll be able to get some attention.

March to the Moon will be available on CaliferGames.com and on the XBox on Friday morning.  I'm hoping to release on IndieCity soon as well, but they haven't been approving any games for some time.  Wait, I just checked and they've approved some today!  Glad to see that they're back on track again.  Hope it won't take too long for them to go over March to the Moon again, but I'm sure they've built up a backlog by now.

In the Siphon Spirit realm, Peter is being secretive.  He's working on a big piece of art and won't show it to me.  He hasn't even had time to get into the game to see if the extra stuff I added to make it more clear that you are not supposed to run into stuff looks right.  Once all the cutscene stuff is finished we should be able to get the alpha demo out the door in no time.

March to the Moon release upcoming

Thanks to Pixel Prospector I now have an idea of how I can sell March to the Moon on the Califer Games site without losing half of the profits.  So I'm aiming at a Saturday release.  I've been holding off on the Xbox release until IndieCity okays me (though you can still get the game in their underground store), but I haven't gotten a response from them for a while now so I'm going to push the Xbox version out on Saturday as well.

There's a bit of a difference with all the different versions.  The Xbox version has a longer load time, the Indie City version has some simple DRM and achievements, and the Califer Games version is DRM free.  It'll be good to finally get it all finished so I'm no longer working on three different games!


In Siphon Spirit land Peter's cleaning things up more to try to make it more obvious what you can and can't absorb and that it's bad to touch the enemies even if you're bigger.  The demo is coming, but we need to work out a few kinks first.


Califer's Japanese Class (again, temporary name) has been keeping me busy as well.  I've got the first screen finished, and added something that will handle menu navigation for me so hopefully the next few screens will be done in no time at all.  I also have about half of the hiragana fully animated now, so that shouldn't hold me back too much.  My main concern right now is getting the game fully operational again, with the screens that I wasn't able to finish last time and get the basics of the RPG battle stuff in by the next Indie Game Night that I'm assuming will be at the end of September, probably just a few days after my birthday.

I've also been doing planning for two other games that I plan on making soon.  Every time I finish a session of planning stuff out I just feel like smacking myself for not having enough self control.  Surely three concurrent projects should be enough for any sane person!

Back From Vacation!

I mean, I am.  Peter left on vacation earlier this week.  Maybe we should have just gone on vacation together.  Peter's got some art in the first level to help people see what they are supposed to do now.  Take a look below!  It still needs a little work, like having the heart shoot a little less often, but I think we're just about there now.

I've been tightening up the graphics.  For some reason there have been some graphical glitches so I'm working on cleaning up the content managers and reworking my texture manager to work a little better.  I also set things up so that if the game does crash the game would send me an email with the crash log so I don't need to rely on the user finding the crash log, getting my email and emailing it to me.  That would probably never happen outside of testing.

It took me a little longer than I had planned to get all the achievements in for the Indie City version of the game.  Then I sent it in and apparently it crashes in the Indie City DLL after about 10 minutes of play.  I think I got it fixed last night, but I only had 15 minutes to test it.  One thing I do know is that my Spirit-Paladin is pretty awesome with a double boost to holy damage and plenty of opportunities to heal myself.  Even after working on it for a year I still have fun playing March to the Moon :)

Down to....two issues!

Okay, this feels much better.  Now I can see the whole game on my little standard-def TV.  It was such a pain before when I couldn't see enemies at the sides, or even how much HP I had left.  I THINK that I also have it fixed for HD TVs, but I haven't been able to go check it yet.  Now I just need to take care of a few slowdown issues and I can get it out there.

Peter's been working like a maniac rewriting the beginning of Siphon Spirit and he should have the the new first level done tonight.  The hope is that we'll have a new demo for people to play in about two weeks.

Down to...three issues.

I got the saving and loading working.  Now I just need to make the saving not make the game stop.  One step forward and one step back.  The worst part is that I can only work on it while I'm at home and not cleaning or watching the kids.  That's like 30 minutes a day, and deploying the game to the xbox is pretty slow.  Needless to say, I don't get a whole lot done that way.  I'm hoping to get them released at the same time, but I haven't been able to make much headway on the xbox version.  What to do?

Well, I'm still working on the website.  And the demo for Siphon Spirit isn't done yet.  I'll wait on the PC version until those are ready.  There's not a whole lot to do for the Siphon Spirit demo on my end.  I'm fairly certain that I'll have the website finished before the demo is done, so as soon as I get the website ready to roll I'm going to start on my next project.  It's going to be completely different from March to the Moon and will not the be sequel.  It's a fairly short project and I'm hoping to finish it in 3-4 months.  I'll start on March From the Moon after it's finished and I've had the chance to read reviews and see what changes people want.

Down to three issues

Yup!  Just three things left until I can get it in to be reviewed on the xbox.  1. Get the saving and loading working correctly.  2. Display correctly on TVs.  3. Make the screen transitions faster.

I made some progress with 1. yesterday.  I think I'm really close on it now.  Today I'm stopping by a friends house so we can find out what it looks like on a HD TV.  I'm not cool enough to have one myself.  3. is going to be a lot more tricky.  Hopefully I can get it figured out.  The PC version is done but I'm waiting until we get a demo for Siphon Spirit up to help advertise for that as well.  I also need to finish making the new califergames website.

Sorry for the short post, I'm feeling exhausted :(

Getting ready to port to the xbox

Well, the only thing that's keeping me back from putting the game out is the lack of a website to sell it on.  However, I can still put it on the xbox.  I think.  I haven't actually put it on the xbox yet, but I do have a Creator's Club membership and have gotten another XBLIG game onto it and reviewed it.  Hopefully I'll be able to get it on the xbox tonight and get it on there.  I've been busy revamping the website (still) and have started on the March to the Moon section now.  Going to work on the Siphon Spirit section next and hopefully have a short updated demo of it before March to the Moon comes out.