As promised on the forums earlier this week, here are a series of announcements about our current and future plans.
GreenLight
We know this first announcement isn't going to be popular but after much discussion we've decided to temporarily put GreenLight on hold as of today.
There are many factors that have led to this decision, the main ones are:
-The iNw team is currently running on just 6 active members and we are missing some skills needed to create GL.
-Torque Shader Engine has only recently hit Milestone 2 (halfway to release 1.0) and isn't quite as complete as we'd hoped.
-To take advantage of some parts of the Torque Shader Engine requires knowledge that we don't yet have.
We must stress that this does not mean that the project is cancelled and we feel that putting it on hold is the best thing for both the project and the iNw team. We are fully committed to this project and are working on resolving the problems that are holding us up - see next announcements below.
We will be resuming work on GreenLight before the end of the year but can confirm that it will not reach beta in 2005.
The Flying Empires
Today we are excited to announce that development is underway on our second game which we are calling 'The Flying Empires'.
The Flying Empires is a free multiplayer arcade 3D shooter where players take control of different types of planes. It's a unique fast-paced objective based game that is played out in teams with controls designed for mouse/keyboard. We have several reasons for undertaking this project:
-It's designed as a small, simple and fun game.
-It's far simpler than GreenLight and easily achievable with our current team.
-It's perfect for a project using TSE in its current state and will give us the extra knowledge needed for GreenLight.
-Having something playable and released will attract new talent to the team to speed the development of GreenLight.
We want to involve the community as much as possible in the creation of this game and will be posting all development progress instead of just complete work. We expect there to be a phase of beta testing and GreenLight beta testers will get to play the game first. We will be announcing many more details of this new game over the coming weeks.
Forum Changes
Today we took the forums down for a little while to do some changes, these included some new forums:
-GL Development Shots - This forum will be used to show off some of the hundreds of GreenLight development screens we've taken over the past couple of years.
-The Flying Empires - New forums have been added to chat about our new game 'The Flying Empires', we will post progress shots and info in these soon.
We have some more upgrades to perform on the forums but have put them back online for now so the community can post their thoughts on these announcements.
New Websites
We are working on 3 new websites - an all new iNvasionWorks site and official sites for GreenLight and The Flying Empires.
Over the past few months we have been developing our own web technology that will power these sites. This new technology makes managing the new sites incredibly easy and adds many new features. Our main aim with the iNvasionWorks site is to make it easier for the community to see what we are working on, new features include:
-Brand new design and better organisation
-Forums integration allowing members to post comments direct to the main site.
-All new blog section for each iNw team members where we will be keeping the community updated on all development work instead of infrequent posts when work is complete.
-New popup media viewer allowing easier browsing of new media.
-RSS Feeds allowing members to stay updated on the latest news without having to visit the website.
-Search facility to allow visitors to easily find what they are looking for.
-News Archive.
Release dates for these new sites are currently unavailable but we can confirm that the new iNvasionWorks site will be launched first.
Visit the forums here
Visit the old site here
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