It’s almost over

My full-time Indy MMOG, Galactic Melee is almost over now – both in the bad way, out of money, and in the good way, of being finished. Feature-wise there’s only about a week left to do before calling it feature-complete. It’s all pretty much debugged and working, and even has some usability and gameplay polish. On the other hand, I’m grinding the bone financially. Just giving up for 6-12 months to finish it part-time on my own is a serious option, because even paying the rent is in jeopardy now.

These next two weeks are going to be the litmus test of if the game ships. With the new game mode and settings in, the game is as fun as I can make it and still ship before I am out on the street. If my next wave of alpha testers actually sticks around and plays, then this means I’m onto something and will continue. If they run into the usual install and running problems, and those that can play mostly quit, then I really have no choice. With no money left and a game not polished enough to sell yet I’ll have to take a job and work part-time to fix the more fundamental problems. There’s really about 2 months of work to address all these.

* Replace Physics Engine. Unfortunately, PhysX doesn’t support older versions of Windows than XP. It also doesn’t support Linux. It’s also the cause of about half of my user’s installation problems, such as requiring admin rights. By replacing it, I can increase my potential customer base by over 25%.
* Replace most of the art. Due to never-ending communication problems, that only 3D art that I have that is really right is the art that I did myself, which is about 1/4 of the total art. I really need a working exporter, and a usable pipeline for the artists. By carefully selecting it so users only see the working 1/4, the game looks fine, but there’s really a lot to be fixed and the game could have been a lot better looking.
* Fix the website. The website sucks right now. It needs a serious overhaul to draw in people at the level I am looking for. There were a lot of features, such as stats, mailing list, integrated forums, that I wanted that never got done.
* Add missing graphics effects. I never got a decent graphics programmer. Only about 15% of the effects that I wanted are actually in the game. I wanted to make a game that was packed with cool effects, and the best I accomplished was animated textures.
* Add command screen. Ranks, giving orders, and giving orders through an RTS like interface was one of the major original planned features that got dropped.
* Add voice communications. Also got dropped.
* Add medals. Also got dropped, though it’s a smaller task.

On top of that, I really should run a long beta. People will forgive problems in beta that they won’t when you are charging and beta is the best way to find out what these problems are. Shipping now and skipping a meaningful beta is a risk.