Two important dates to note in your SO diaries.

1) The last possible date to submit your cameo sprites and portraits is Sunday, December the 15th, so if you want a shot at fame in Demo 4 then make sure we have your stuff by then! Especially you, Dev!

2) Demo 4 is scheduled for release on Friday the 20th of December. This means we have about two weeks to finish everything that needs doing. This causes stress. Stress causes ulcers and hair loss. Smash Software is a little too literal at the moment.

Anyway, that’s the news. Devlyn, Valderin, Moogie and everyone else, we need to have your complete cameos within a week. Everyone else – the demo should be out the week after :)

Keep the faith!

Seeing as Devlyn was showing off SMEE yesterday, I thought maybe you Shining Online fans would like to get a small peak at the tools I’ve written for SO.

Here’s a screen of SODA (Shining Online Development Application).

I may post more at a later date. Whether or not the package will be released is undecided though.

Yep, as anyone who gets the newsletter would have known yesterday, a special LAN edition of Shining Online is currently being developed by the Good Ty. We hope to have it completed within the next two weeks, giving us plenty of time to iron out the kinks in the battle system and generally have a good time insulting and hacking each other to pieces.

As I said in the newsletter, this multiplayer edition will not be made available to the general public, although we will probably release some lovely screenshots of us insulting each other in our favourite ways. Great stuff.

Keep the faith!

Edit: I forgot to mention this – for those who want to subscribe to future issues of the newsletter, send an email to newts@shining-online.co.uk with “subscribe newsletter” somewhere, either in the subject or main body, and I’ll make sure you get the next issue along! :)

It’s a bit odd that I’m posting news about a newsletter… oh well, this is just to let our subscribers know the latest edition of the Shining Online newsletter will be released on Monday, hopefully with none of the annoying glitches that have plagued us in the past :P

For all those people pestering us about the Demo 4 release, stop it! We’re both still working out little cotton socks off to get the demo finished as soon as we can, and as I said in the interview [in the articles section, if you’ve not already read it :P] I think a December release is certainly a realistic expectation, bordering on sensible :P

Ty and myself interviewed Devlyn yesterday, so we hope to have that uploaded for your delight in the very near future, and we also have a whole load of interviews planned :)

That’s about all my news I think, keep the SO faith!

PS Congratulations to Dev for managing quite some updates recently :P

(No, the game hasn’t really been canned. We’re still working hard, and the demo is still on schedule for a “whenever it’s ready” release.)