A Week Without Updates!? An AVWW Status Report.

Ever since beta started, we've hardly gone a business day without updates, but here we've now gone a week since the last AVWW update.  Fear not!  This isn't the start of some new trend.  It's just been a confluence of events.

First of all, I was out of the office last Thursday and Friday due to some personal stuff.  Then we've also been preparing for Minecon, where we're going to be an exhibitor.  This includes getting both a new trailer going (which is almost ready!) and that new Getting Started Guide that we posted earlier today.  Then there's been a whole bunch of stuff to do with various distributors for AVWW and our other titles, and some general nearing-year-end business maintenance stuff.  Oh, and a number of press interviews or Q&As on several subjects.

Goodness!  All of this has culminated in my being unable to work on the game directly much until today, but now all that seems to be quieting down (knock on wood!).  Meanwhile:

* Josh has been hard at work on a variety of things including the Getting Started Guide and helping to test multiplayer
* Keith has been powering through the last of the multiplayer stuff for pre-public-alpha of that feature.  He's almost got it to the point where we can start having some people opting in to testing multiplayer outside of the confines of Arcen staff, which is very exciting.
* Pablo has composed two awesome new tracks that I'm very excited about, one of which is for a new region type that isn't ready to go quite yet, but which will be really fitting for when that region is integrated.
* Erik of course has been busy as usual with all the PR/marketing side of things, but particularly with Minecon preparations and the trailer work.

I've got a number of items on my shortlist of features that I want to work on for myself, but what I decided to work on today is some more advanced enemy AI.  Basically allowing for single enemies to have more complex patterns of attacks, and even unique combinations of attacks for specific individual bosses, etc.  The existing bosses won't get these features since they are inherently meant to be simpler, but one of the new bosses I'm working toward is the first true Overlord type of enemy (versus the game just using stat-inflated minibosses for the overlords, which was always a placeholder mechanic).

There are also some other cool things on my shortlist, such as multi-boss rooms, outdoor boss arenas, underground rare commodity caverns, and enchants.  Not to mention just general new spells and scrolls and enemies.  And I keep meaning to add more stuff to craft at the outfitter, too, but that keeps getting bumped for other stuff that is more exciting in the short-term.

There's a lot that's coming, anyhow, and the next beta update should be either tomorrow or Friday, but probably tomorrow.  Just figured I'd give folks an update on what's going on internally here!  Definitely a really busy and exciting time, and we'll be back to our usual pattern of frequent updates starting late this week and into early next week.