No IGC for me =(

I really had planned to go to IGC this year but it just isn't going to work out financially or with my work schedule. Ah well, there is always next year =) Phil Carlise has already agreed to help represent one of my current projects there so it won't be all bad. I really think someone should setup a streaming web cam and let all of those who aren't going to make it tune in.

Projects/Status:

Digital Boneyard
I opened http://www.digitalboneyard.com up to the public today! I haven't finished everything on the site but I have enough done for people to start posting resources. For those who may not know what dby.com is, it is a website for unfinished, unused, or ugly game development resources. It is designed to be a dumping ground for any of those things you have worked on and never finished but think have some worth. A lot of people have expressed interest in this site so hopefully we will get some cool stuff on there.

BoomBall
Two teams, one giant ball, and a lot of rockets!

BoomBall started out as a little side project for Tom Bampton and me to work on between our other many projects and has blossomed into something a lot more. From that little description alone we snagged two more coders in the first 10 mins and already have a very vocal fan (yay Mango!). We reached our first playable stage last Friday (15 days) and are refining the concept after play testing this weekend. We hope to have a fairly complete alpha done in the next two weeks that we can release. A little later this year we intend to roll the content into Rocket Jump Racing and Jetpack Basketball and bundle all 3 together =)

We are in desperate need of some artists though! For now we are tossing in placeholder programmer art but we really would like to see something less offensive soon (my attempt at skinning the rocket launcher went badly =P). This is a pretty light project artwise at this stage. We need 3 rocket launchers, 4 balls, 3 arenas/stadiums, 9 pickups models and icons, some misc decorations (flags and such), a hud, and a skinned menu. Later we would like to add some new player models (right now it is Test Guy vs Realm Wars Elf =) and some new animations (taunts) but that can wait for now. The art style we are aiming for is your typical futuristic sport/arena style: lots of neon colors, over the top animations, costumes, and hairstyles, lots of loud music and a booming, wise-cracking announcer. Kinda like cheesy American wrestling =) If you are interested in helping please feel free to email me at matt@rustycode.com or grab me on the GG IRC channel. There are two main goals in this project: have fun and get it done!