Ahoy!

First off, thanks! You all rock. We've been floored by the response so far. Not only does it get us closer to our goal, but it's a huge boon to our morale with ever donation we get. Again, thanks so much.

Work on Liferaft continues, though unfortunately for this update, much of it is behind the scenes. We've been struggling with the design of the levels for the finished episode and the general philosophy behind our approach. I wrote up an article about on my blog here: http://mile222.com/2009/09/the-trouble-with-not-knowing-what-were-doing/

For updates that are playable though, most of the visible stuff has to do with the fireflies. We took a better part of today to flesh out a 2nd draft of how the fireflies will look. This includes particle effects, various animations and a brand new explosion! Those are always fun... (Also if you tried playing earlier and you couldn't make it up the elevator, that bug has been fixed).

Here's the latest build (make sure to clear your cache and refresh before playing) http://intuitiongames.com/games/liferaft/

Also in that build you'll see a "level 2" which is part of a "tutorial level" that won't actually work (the platforms will be invisible) because the appropriate setting to see them is turned off.

Next up, Mike will be continuing with the levels (sorry, those won't be playable pre-release) and I will be working on more assets to enrich the environment, animations and enemies/bosses. I've also spent a few hours working on some concepts for Act 2. If I continue with those more I'll be sure to post them here for you to see.

It's raining here right now. It rained yesterday too. :(

Nonetheless Mike's been working hard on integrating some new performance fixes into Liferaft. Previously we couldn't even get 30FPS to record the very footage we just uploaded for the Liferaft gameplay snippet. But, now we're at a solid 30FPS and we've just uploaded that version for everyone to play.

First, some things to be aware of. In this current fix when you click the "Level 1" button to start the game you'll notice some hanging. That's totally normal for this version and will be completely taken out for final release. Essentially, the game is flattening all the dynamic image data into much more digestible bits. This way we can dynamically change things on the fly and don't have to worry about manually baking said image data. So when you're loading up the level, just be patient, it'll eventually go.

Without further ado... link!

http://www.intuitiongames.com/games/liferaft

Performance isn't rock-solid as of yet, but this is a big leap ahead from the previous version and hopefully a lot more folks with older computers can try it out now. If you have troubles, concerns or ideas please let us know. We're suckers for any kind of feedback.

Next up we'll be putting in a sub-boss, 1 of 2 bosses in the demo level, and hope to get that roughed in there by the end of the week.