Fresh new website.

Ah, been exceptionally busy for the past 2 months. This blog has remained largely inactive because of that. The fact is I update my personal blog like way too often (, almost every other day) than this blog, which by the way is on a brand new site.

A couple of interesting events.

1. The corporate website for the team and the game is being worked on. I am keeping things hush hush because it is not fully online nor is it fully operational. I will update the blog soon with the name and details. Getting ready for the big announcement ;).

2. I have a personal website www.susheelspace.com . This will be my personal website not the team website nor the game website. It may not be fully operational as yet but I will get to it in a couple of days.

3. My main blog has now shifted to blog.susheelspace.com. It's the same blog I had on free-hostia (susheel.freehostia.com/blog). Got tired of the incessant problems with free hosting.

An extended update.

Bored with reading "oh the game is going on fine, but there are small problems" type posts? Want to know exactly what is going on? Well refer my blog entry which gives out extended technical details on what exactly is going on with the game. Let me warn you though, it contains some gory technical details.

If you are a techie type you can check out my blog. I often give out far more details of the game technology and the posts are more technology specific than over here. That's it for this time.

Beta feedback updates.

Based on beta feedback I have made some changes to the third-person camera. Now the camera is much much smoother for lower FPS values. This is just great because now the game appearers to run far smoother on lower FPS values than it did earlier. I am currently working on minor issues (also based on the feedback) with camera itself.

The AI work is also ON simultaneously. I generally hate to take up two issues at once, but I need my new modifications tested as well and I am trying to balance out things so that beta testing can go on simultaneously. Not the most ideal of situations I know, but can't help it. The AI tweaks are taking longer than anticipated, but then again there are some business issues that I am looking into as well.

Some minor issues still remain. Especially ones like flickering on ATI cards and some problems with disappearing triangles on some cards. Why can't people just buy NVIDIA cards and make life simpler for us (game developers). Oh well, got to live with that.

Whew its been a very hectic week. Nearly put in 90+ hours already. I need to take a break and give the cerebrum a rest.

Tweaks plus tune-ups.

An interesting week. I spent most of my time last week tuning the AI system in the game. It isn't ready yet, so the work goes on. Beta 0.0.3 was a feature freeze and I hope to wind down the coding work on the game in a couple of week and aim for a code freeze in about 20 days. We still have to do bulk of the game levels so that will take up some time (even after the freeze).

We still have some issues with ATI h/w and DirectX. I shouldn't even be mentioning OpenGL because ATI OpenGL drivers are written by armatures and are broken in every place. The strange thing is some card models work perfectly and on others the errors are totally bizarre. I am tired of ATI OpenGL combination. So much so, I am officially asking the beta testers not to test with the OpenGL driver on ATI h/w. (Sorry if this sounds like a rant!) Anyways, I hope to solve all pending issues before the code freeze.

Progress has been slow on the beta testing front. One of the testers was preoccupied with some work on other issues not relating to the game. I am sure we will pick up the pace this week. No major issues yet, so that is good news (, or no news) too. Some feedback on the gameplay, but nothing related to crashes and GPFs.

Problems with my site on freehostia continue. Can't do too much about that. Moving the site to a permanent location will probably be done after the code freeze. Probably, maybe before that, lets hope it will be done before that. In the meantime have patience if the current site is down.

Gameplay and Hardware.

The entire of last week was spent ironing out gameplay issues. Small annoying things that could have just put-off a game player are being addressed. Some bugs also remain. There are a few, and there always are, which have taken a special nagging status. The worst ones are the ones that happen infrequently and I am currently working on exactly such a one, but I think most issues should be resolved soon.

Some adjustments are also being made to the game defaults so it can run on older hardware. How old, that is a question which will be answered when the game is finished :)). I think, the game should run on a FX 5200 (or equivalent) and above. I found that most on-board Intel cards are pathetic, your best bet on them is DirectX, you can forget about OpenGL. Lucky for us the game can run using either API. I am trying my best to support Intel cards, but new issues keep coming up all the time. NVIDIA cards have good support for both DirectX and OpenGL, no problems there. ATI cards can have broken OpenGL support on some models, but good DirectX support all round.

Too many problems with the website

There is just too many problems with the website on freehostia. The site is down for almost half a day now. Too much frustration! The entire photo gallery is out of commission because of that. I will probably move to a permanent website very very soon. I have had it with free hosts!

Yes I am still here.

I have been working on the all the small issues of beta lately, plus I have been involved in issues on other fronts as well. But the work is ON smoothly. We are planning on adding more levels to the game just to give it more play time. I will give all the details about that very soon.

I know I haven't kept my promise about uploading a video, the fact is I haven't managed to acquire a good capture software. Lame excuse! I know, sorry. But I have been a little bit busy finishing small issues which I think should have a higher priority. I will capture a video soon, I promise.

Good news on the web-page front. We will be having our own site soon. So no more outage problems. The current website has had too many outages in the recent past. I am sorry.

A couple of people have been asking me when the game will be out, I just want to say soon. I have prepared an FAQ for all that stuff including a brief on what the game is and what it will take to run it. You can catch the FAQ here.

Small 3D technology preview.

I have posted a small technology preview about the Doofus 3D game on my personal blog. I don't want to cram this blog (, which only blogs progress of the game) with boring technology details so I have just placed a link to it. It's some information on how lighting and shadows are done in the game. Nothing too much, I have tried to keep everything simple and have tried to keep the details to a minimum. Check it out, its something new and exiting not just a bland progress update.

Meanwhile problems with freehostia continue so you may experience downtimes, please be patient. I am working on a permanent solution to the problem.

Personal and technical blog.

Whew! Two weeks of little work.

The past two weeks have had only a fraction of the work from my side. Why? First an attack of influenza, that was bad enough, took 7 straight days off my work schedule. That wasn't the end of it, three days ago another bout with the common cold. It's like a double whammy! It's the beginning of the rains here, so such things were expected, but not is such rapid succession. :(

I have been up against some issues from the beta. Bugs like, levels ending prematurely, jerks in the gameplay and things like that. No critical bugs like crashes or GPFs. So that is great. Actually it isn't, small bugs are notoriously difficult to solve and you end up pulling your hair over them. Damm, some of them are really getting on my nerves. I have been on and off on one for about 2 days now.

The game will have an official website soon. I am in the process of finalizing some business side of things and that has kept me busy too. I am having a very bad experience with freehostia. The site has been down 6 to 7 times a day. That is just way too bad. I have had it with free hosting sites. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I will have a permanent website and I can move all the development related progress over there.

Problems with the website.

The old website (susheel.ifastnet.com) was mysteriously taken down for reasons as yet unknown to me. The result was the screen-shot gallery went offline. I had to move the existing website to another location (which was quite a bit of work). In any case the site and up and things are back to normal. You can find the screen-shots here. I have updated the links on the pics below so clicking on them should also work now.

As far as the beta goes, there have been no major issues as expected, but there are issues that need looking into. This website migration thing has kept me busy so there were no more screen-shots or videos as promised. I hope I can get over to these things this coming weekend.

Beta released! Finally!

After a last minute delay, the beta (version 0.0.3) was released today morning. It's been a hectic 2 days after a small issue was found and (thankfully) fixed. This should be the last and final beta before the release of RCs in a couple of weeks.

I will upload more screens in a couple of days and perhaps a Youtube video if time permits. In the meantime beta testers are testing out the release. Hopefully there won't be any major issues. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Hard at work on the beta release.

The final beta release is scheduled for 16th June, 2007. This release features the complete functionality of the game and is a run-up release to the first Release Candidate (RC1), meaning the game is functionally ready.

I spent the entire of last week and a better part of this week already, on the in-game GUI. The GUI is turning out to pretty good, considering that it was a major hassle to work with when we first integrated it into the engine. I will post screens of the GUI in a couple of days once all of it is complete.

I am currently looking out for Release Candidate testers/players so as to get feed back on the game. I have managed to rope in 4 guys already, plus our (2) beta testers, hopefully I can find more. Sorry to disappoint, but the current beta release is only meant for in-house beta testing. Hopefully the RC1 will be pretty soon (in the following week). Will keep you posted.

First post and new screen-shots.

This is my first post to this blog. I will regularly post updates to the game we are developing. I have been really busy with the development of this game for the past 2 years. The game is now entering final beta release cycle and we are at a liberty to post some screen-shots and movie clips in the run-up to the release.

We would welcome comments and critics on any of the material posted here or on the website of the game. I have posted some in-game screen-shots of the work completed so far.

Click on the images to go directly to the entire gallery with larger images.


Dynamic shadows create a great effect.



Amazing graphic effects.



Cool cartoon levels.



Dynamic game-play.



Interactive game content.