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Darkness Springs now open to play for everyone!

Just minutes ago, I unlocked the role playing game Darkness Springs to the public. The game is now in open beta and can be played by everyone. It is not even necessary to register, sign up or similar. Simply go here and click the 'play' button.

The game does not contain all content of the full game yet (will be unlocked in the next weeks), but it should already contain something between 4 and 6 hours of gameplay, depending on how you play. Happy playing.
Any kind of feedback (via the support form, by email, in the comments of this blog or in the game forum) is welcome.
Update: Links corrected now, the game should work now.

Mail delivery failure notice II

I wonder how parcel services are doing this. Are they hiding at the corner of the building, waiting until you left the building for 10 minutes, then run to your door, ring and leave the note that they couldn't deliver the parcel because you weren't there? At least I think there should be a special paragraph reserved for parcel services in Murphy's law.

Mail delivery failure notice I

Did you send me a mail during the last days and didn't receive an answer? Probably because I didn't receive your mail. There was a spam list server which decided to identify every single mail as 'spam' some days ago, also used by my mail server. Please resend :)

Gamedesign Headaches

If you ever played a game where I was responsible not only for the programming but also the level and game designing part you might know that I may know how to programm some stuff, but I am definitively the worst game designer on earth. Games designed by me usually are not fun at all and are interesting for the technical aspect at least - if at all.
I faced this reality again when the closed beta of Darkness Springs started some weeks ago - nearly all testers told me that the game gets a bit boring and is difficult. Woha.
So in order to improve the situation I allocated some time now to tweak all parts of the game the beta testers reported to be worth improving. That list is not too short, but after it has been worked off I'll make the game publically available finally, as public beta test. I hope that this will be in the next few weeks and that a public beta will help it to improve even more after this.

Self-praise permitted?

Recently I've been involved with another commercial game project, and I decided to implement it using irrlicht and irrklang, a process named dogfooding. Now that the project is reaching its final milestone, I think it was a very good decision: The game was written in record time and had no technical bugs at all. Sound integration was extremely easy using irrklang, and irrEdit helped me editing levels without the need to change on line of code which was a life saver. Additionally, bitplanes additions to irrlichts gui and his font tool have proven to be extremely useful.
This was one of the few times where I personally used Irrlicht again for a commercial game project and I like the library we created even more after this, and became fond of my own additions :). I don't think I will be allowed to reveal what game this actually is, but I'll ask the decision makers anyway, let's see.

irrBlend - Blender to Irrlicht exporter

Not long time has passed since Irrlicht received its own file formats (.irr for scenes and .irrmesh for static meshes), because it originally only included importers for external file formats. That's also the reason why there are not that much .irr and .irrmesh exporters yet, but there are some few. One is irrb, a Blender to Irrlicht exporter:

It is hosted on google code and open source of course. Currently, only static meshes are supported, but as you can see on their website, it already is very useful.