Hey everyone! Ignore the horrible photo of me in the last post. There are way better pictures of me on the web.

As Dan introduced, I am Andy Moore (“weasel”), professional Community Designer and Manager. I’m a big fan of Cortex Command, and have been following it for years. I’ll be the BatPhone – the direct line to the Commissioner that you, the fans, can pick up at any time. I’m active in the forums and on IRC as well, and am trying to crank up the level of transparency you guys see.

In my travels I’ve found that many indie developers love to have a community, and love to have a fan following – but detest the level of commitment and the hours of work it takes to put into keeping it running smoothly. Most devs simply want to concentrate on making the game, and not deal with all the emotional issues that come up with forum drama and constant email requests. That’s where I step in!

I’m hoping to post here very regularly – maybe get it down to once per day, but we’ll see how much content I’m able to generate. Dan suggested I tease you guys with some new art, so I’ve clipped two bits of it into this post. I’ll reveal the rest of the image over the coming days. 🙂

If anyone wants to get in touch with me – the best bet is the forums or IRC. I’m happy to share my email address though: andy@datarealms.com. Drop me a line if you want to discuss anything – it might take me weeks to get back to you, but I will try to write back to everyone.

In the coming weeks I’ll see about slapping together some videos, interviews, get some long-standing questions answered, and see what other media I can come up with. Peace out.

We’re well aware how frustratingly slow of a trickle the information from the Cortex Command development team have been to our fans. It’s time to face it: I don’t have the energy and/or discipline to do a decent job of informing you guys of the awesome stuff going on behind the scenes. After working on a feature all day and night, I simply don’t have it in me to then also write a coherent article about it.

So, I’ve been looking for a solution to this for some time. While at GDC Austin last week, I found it in a gentleman who does this kind of thing professionally. Andy Moore (aka “Weasel”) will be acting as the conduit of information and feedback between us in the dev trenches and the fan/modding community:

Andy next to a lineup of Indie greats: Phil of Fez, Matthew and Shawn of Blurst, Alec of Aquaria,
Kyle of all things Savage, and the Saltsmans of Semi Secret

My fellow indie friends at Wolfire Games have an awesome dedicated PR guy, John Graham, who does just this, and look at how well updated their dev blog is for their super impressive project, Overgrowth! I’m hoping we can, with Andy’s help, approach this level of connection with you guys again.

Without further ado, I’m going to hand it over to Andy now and let him introduce himself in the next post. I will still chime in here in the future, but now you shouldn’t be going long without knowing what’s happening to the project!

For the next few days, Data Realms is representing at The Independent Gaming Source’s inaugural TIGJam 2008! Will be good times getting work done next to some of the indie game development community’s finest.

Live stream from ground zero: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tigjam-2008

Collection of posted screenshots from jam participants: http://www.tigjam.com

UDPATE:

It’s all over, and t’was the BEST TIGJAM EVER!
Photos: http://www.datarealms.com/stuff/photos/tigjam08/

Here’s an update on the Mac version of Cortex Command, straight from porter extraordinaire Chris himself:

“Last night was productive. The game is running again now. The most annoying debug session ever. The main problem was ridiculous.

It turns out the problem (i’ll save you too much of the gory details), was my use of a non-standard wifi dongle for my Internet connection!

If you don’t use the Airport … you’re in for a nasty surprise.

Unbelievable that it can cause an exception so deep in workings of Mac OSX it was distinctly non-trivial to find. I was so perplexed I started looking for harebrained causes, and eventually I was lucky enough to get a crash that didn’t completely overwrite the stack and I noticed it was crashing deep in the os dns lookup library somewhere.

Short story: It was just trying to get its own hostname on game startup and blowing up in my face because it assumes the use of the Airport.

Now, I can concentrate on the mouse, which is the original bloody problem :)”

The mouse issues he refers to appear to be related to legacy mouse interface code in Allegro which causes the mouse to skip and not be responsive. He’ll probably have to write new mouse handlers that use more modern API’s.

Other than that, things are looking good for a Mac release very soon!

Yep, and it’s dynamic so when new tunnels are created and old ones get clogged with corpses, the AI will always know the path of least resistance to their targets – even if it means digging through lots of material!

This will change the necessity to heap tons of stupid AI guys on you like we used to do in the test builds. Now only a handful of smarty enemies should make a much more fun challenge than before.

It also means your own AI-controlled bodies can be commanded more specifically and be able to carry out much more complex tasks. Don’t want to bother digging that tunnel yourself? Just send one of your drones to do it for you, and he’ll expertly avoid rocks and other subterranean obstacles on the way.

UPDATE:

“Look Pa – I did it all on my own!”

Here it is! I’ll write more about what has changed soon… but there’s a lot: AI (both enemy and your own non-controlled team members), magazine reloading, new gun, better digging tools, complete main menu, customizable controls, etc.

No need to uninstall the last one, this one will install over it correctly.

So I wrote the new build would be out on Friday… but It’s now really late and I still really want to add and test the abilityof the AI bots to dig properly with the blasters… now they just act stupid when they can’t get to the target.

Customizable controls have just been completed, so it’s possible to change them in the new pretty main menus and options screen. They get saved etc to the settings file. Real slick. Lots of other additions too. Changed the maps, singleplayer mode, etc etc etc.

I’ll sleep and see if I can’t get the AI behaving in the morning. Regardless, we’ll push out the build this weekend.