A new release of MD is immenint. We're about two weeks late, but I am fairly certain there will be an upload sometime in the next few days. Basically we are just polishing at this point.

This will be the first semi-playable version of the game. I say semi-playable because the game is not playable as it is meant to be played, but there is a game element in it, sort of a mini-game. Research, Unit Design, and Combat are all working, and this allowed us to put together a combat simulator kind of thing. You will research technologies to design better units. The units will then be combat tested against other players. There is even a primitive scoring system

What's not working yet are the cities and resource collection, so there's no economic factors in the game yet. Everything in the mini-game is free, once you've researched the technologies to design your units.

I'll post here when the actual upload occurs, for those interested in helping us test the engine

We did some internal playtesting and ran across a few issues that needed to be resolved (a few bugs, and a couple of places where there is a lack of important information). None of them are particularly serious, and we're already well along in addressing them. Give us a few more days.

I do appreciate the e-mails you guys have been sending, especially the positive ones But also I can certainly understand those who are irritated at me for being late. Just keep in mind, we want to have it working, and working well, before we let it "ship" (unlike some game companies I could name, heh). In the end, I think it's better to have a working game (even as primitive as it is right now) rather than one that was released on time.

So bear with us. It won't be much longer.

The last update before the release.

The demo game will be released on Sunday, August 20th. That's a hard date. As in, I won't be late on that one.

Only one of the three bugs I've been working on still remain. I originally thought the three might be connected. They weren't. The final bug is the one where units attack even when they can't do any damage. It turns out this is a much more serious bug than I thought, for the damage calculations are not being performed properly for *any* of the units, even the combatants. It was only more noticable for the non-combatants, since they are supposed to be a special case (and weren't behaiving properly). But on further digging, I found that none of them were calculating their damage correctly. Oops.

Anyway, get ready to start playing. A game can support up to 10 people right now (I don't expect any games will actually play that many people at this point). Soon I intend to lift that restriction alltogether, and make it virtually unlimited. But that's for the next version.

Speaking of which....

Since this is a sort of semi-playable version of the game, I thought it might be nice to add another layer to the complexity of the game, to bring us that much closer to the actual play of the game. In version 0.3.7 you get 10 new units every turn, generated randomly from the unit designs you have made as a player, and these new units (plus any you had from previous turns) are sent against another randomly chosen player's set of units.

But there is no cost associated with building those units. You only need to have researched all the needed techs for your template and components to design the unit. For the next version, I thought we might add in the resources, and make you actually choose which units to build by putting them into your production queue. Resources would be given out randomly (since normal resource collection wouldn't yet be possible).

I think this would be a fairly simple addition, since it requires only the addition of resource techs (which we already have), a production queue (very similar to the already working research queue), some code to generate random resources every turn, and some code to credit the players with appropriate units from the queue as they are built (again, very similar to the already functional research queue).

Thoughts?

Of course, I'll release a patch, if needed, to correct any serious bugs we've missed for this version well before the next version comes out.

There's a mini tutorial on the same page