Yes indeedy, after a little play testing, bug repair work and a little tidying up on the presentation front i reckon that Quantizer is actually ready for release…! The “official” date is going to be this coming Saturday, at which point it’ll be available to download and the highscore table will be reset to defaults because a few of the playtesters have thoroughly abused that chain break bug to crank their scores up!

There’s a bug.. two in fact, one in the server side part of the highscore management code (which was kludged, then broke again when i tried to improve it and finally works correctly now) and the other in the game itself that doesn’t reset the chain counter when the player dies (due to an assumption i made when dealing with killing the player’s craft). Both are repaired, although only i’m playing with the corrected game code right now. Depending on the feedback the beta testers give me, that should pretty much make this the final version of the code… unless someone manages to thrash the server.

The huge irony of course is that it was me who found the things after passing the beta out for testing!

Project 2.5, now named Quantizer because i’ve not released a game that starts with Q, is somehow ready for beta testing… and yes, i’m surprised it was that quick as well! There’s just a starfield in the background, three attacker types, pseudo random wave generation and a slightly cobbled classical soundtrack but it’s been enjoyable playing it for the last couple of days and the online highscores work pretty well so far…!

Beta testing should take a couple of days, fingers crossed…

Quantizer - beta version

Update: obviously, something broked… the highscore handling got it’s knickers in a twist and decided that it wasn’t going to keep as many scores as i’d told it to… in fact it seemed adamant that it would only record twelve! That’s been fixed and after a little prodding around i’ve managed to write a sidebar widget for WordPress that can read the online scores and neatly display them (okay, it’s using tables and that’s naughty but it works so i don’t care!)

Project 2.5 is alive… and strictly speaking it has been for a couple of days now, mostly on the Illogistix development box whilst the hardware was being worked on.

At the moment i’m tinkering with the online highscore management and trying to solve an issue with what the game is attempting to transmit to the web server being mangled, after that there is only cosmetics and a couple of features i want to introduce as the levels progress and it’s all but done.