SG; two steps forward, one step back

Last we spoke, we showed off a little video of features in the game. If you missed it, you can still grab it here: www.affectworks.com/features.mov

Well, the big news is that we got contacted by Ajari Wilson www.garagegames.com/my/home/view.profile.php?qid=30426 to create a soundtrack for the game. We just got a first sample of his immense talents last night (well, that sounds kinda dirty) when he shipped over a first draft of the music for Switching Gears. What can I say? It's perfect! Fits so well with the style of the game and the feel of it. It really elevated the whole experience of booting up the game to a whole new level.
If you are looking for quality music for your game, I can heartily recommend Ajari. He's friendly, professional, fast and works for way to cheap.

We have also decided that even though Indie Games Con is cancelled, we are still heading out to Oregon this October for the developer weekend that GG is putting on, as well as hooking up with our producer for some serious planning sessions. We will be bringing a copy of Switching Gears as it stands to get some feedback on it.

So what's the step back? Well, we got Switching Gears to a state where it was playable and we could see exactly what the player will be seeing when he / she boots up the game and we quickly realized "hooboyy... the level design does not contain the flavor of fun". So we are yanking out the pieces that work of what is done and redoing a whole slew of it.
Quark and I are still locked in a struggle to the death, so last week I decided that instead of struggling with Quark to behave I am doing pre-viz / pre-layout in Maya instead (which I am comfortable with). I can quickly layout ideas and thoughts in Maya and then use that as a template for bashing my head against the screen working with Quark for the "real" level. Constructor, whereforth art thou? :)

My programming hetero lifepartner has been extremely busy as well. We now have the hijacking going and working. Still needs some tweaking and tuning, but getting up on the shoulders on the brute character and wreaking havoc with his enormous gun is just plain fun. And that's what it's all about, yeah?

Since no plan is complete without images, here's a picture of a kitty:

edit: heh. Guess they didn't like the hotlink to the kitty image. Image removed.