Plan for Phil Carlisle

The 5 planets have aligned, I swear it!!

Air Ace online - great response to the game. More on that in a sec.

1) AI Pack - still in progress, although obviously my time is pretty much devoted to AA right now, Justin will no doubt announce the bigger picture plan for the pack in due course. Its not dead, hell, its not even pining for the fjords! its alive and well and living in a CVS near you! :)

2) Sheepies (working title). After getting some good prototype gameplay in there, I am happy that this game will work and be a great game. Right now its on a backburner so I can devote time to AA as our main goal. Sheepies weirdly is actually a LOT more work for me than AA, for reasons I'll explain in a sec. But its one of those games that you totally know works, plays well, will absolutely score with players etc. Its a "keeper". So sometime after we ship AA I'll be all over it.

Basically, my attention is on AA and I've really got to attribute a load of that feeling on working with Rog. As much as we can be, it feels like we've got a nice little "team" thing going. Even though we're both massively limited by time, its nice to have that other person to feed off.

Kristen makes up the threesome that is going to deliver this helluva good game!!

Not only have things kind of fallen into place with me, Rog and Kristen, but hell if loads of other things havent fallen into place the same way!!

We found a GREAT community interested in exactly this kind of game. Those guys really are incredible in thier support, making sure we focus on core gameplay and generally making us sure that the game we're creating has an audience.

Not just that, but through friends in the community, we've not been offered hosting by a major UK ISP for gameservers. I dont want to speak out of turn about that deal just yet, but suffice to say that access to test hardware thats not just a local machine will be a great help. Along with a test community that sleeps when we sleep and wakes when we wake!! :)

I'll definitely be pursuing some more opportunities with our brothers across the pond in the US for game hosting and hell, might even manage to scare up some internet game-cafe special edition stuff for those types (that means YOU Davey Ray!).

Not only that (yes there's more). We're looking at a whole bunch of code-shares, code-swaps and general helping each other out kinda deals with loads of other devs here.

I cant say how much help it is, to know that a LOT of the job is really done for you. Using resources from the community, sharing code for code, or maybe hiring someone from the community to do some contract work here and there. It just blows my mind how much we can get done without doing anything! :)

And of course, last but by no means least, we have the old GG crew!

I mean, not only does Torque enable us to deliver top notch AAA quality gameplay on a less-than-shoestring budget. But hell if they dont just go and deliver ALL the functionality we might actually need for a price that has got to make you smile!

Basically, without GG, without friends, co-workers and buddies in the community at large. Well, we wouldnt stand a chance.

So yeah, I'm grinning ear to ear tonight. Having a buzz off just finally being able to feel proud about our little indie band of brothers!!!