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[May 2004] With all ten levels
blocked out and playable, work began on bringing everything
up to finished quality. With a clear goal in sight,
work proceeded much more smoothly. The Containment
level was built and finally put an end to the cold
red landscapes of before, replacing them with lovely
warm tones that created a much richer appearance.
The game is announced in PC Gamer magazine (a full
2 years after starting work) and some of our screenshots
were published. At last we had the final look for
the game, and the final gameplay was pretty much locked
down as well. By now we were in full stride, with
each day bringing awesome features to the game and
a real feeling that we had something special on our
hands.
[August 2004]
Introversion Software began demonstrating the
game to the British gaming press around this time,
armed with a demo that included just the Mine level.
By this point the Mine level in our demo looked
indentical to the Mine level in the finished game.
In fact, most of the game was now starting to look
pretty finished, aside from couple of the later
levels which hadn't even been started. Aiming for
a Christmas release, Introversion Software buckled
down and worked hard to try to bring everything
together.
Beta testing of the
game began around September, and coding was completed
during January of 2005, which of course meant we
missed our Christmas release deadlines. In total
Darwinia was in development for just over 1000 days,
making it one of the longest projects any of us
have ever worked on. We really do hope it was worth
it in the end.
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