Episode 1 of the story mode is ready to be released and we are very excited! This will also mark the first public beta version.

We will start selling the story mode using a pay-what-you-want model, which is strongly inspired by the Humble Indie Bundle (which on the other hand was inspired by a World of Goo sale). After one week we will then set a fixed minimum price.

When you buy the game, you pay for the game as it is, but will also get all further episodes and updates for free. With each further episode, however, the minimum price will increase for new buyers of the game. The sooner you buy, the less you pay, hooray! This is similar to the Alpha-Beta-1.0 price increments of Minecraft.

Right now we are working hard on the presale website and we hope to be able to release Nikki and the Robots' story mode until mid February.

In the next post we will tell you some more details about episode 1, in which Nikki's great adventure begins to unfold.

Some time ago, we wrote about the development of platform robots. They are finished now and turned out to be quite fun:
 

 
We tried to make the platforms have a nice physical feel. Also, they have the following behaviour: If the paths of two platforms have the same length (or one length is a multiple of the other) the platforms will stay in sync, which is very practical!

WARNING: This is a development post. So if you're not into programming, you might find it pretty boring...
 
I am glad, I am not the only one thinking that Haskell can be very complicated at times. This is an error message the ghc just gave me:
 

My brain just exploded.
    I can't handle pattern bindings for [...]

WARNING: This is a development post. So if you're not into programming, you might find it pretty boring...
 
Over the last weeks, I tried to find a good library for sound output. The library should be able to do the following:

• compile on all relevant platforms without to much hassle
• play background music from compressed files
• play sounds triggered by input events without notable lag (for jump sounds, etc.)

First, I looked at Phonon, which is a multimedia API that is part of Qt. But -- apart from being not quite finished and still somewhat buggy -- it's an API for playing multimedia content. That does exclude playing sounds in real time, which is of course something we need.
 
Then I gave SDL a try. On Linux it works very well. But I found compiling SDL on Windows XP rather painful, and I didn't manage to get it compiled with the DirectSound backend, which seems to be necessary to get a low latency for triggered sounds. (I think the backend that was used, is called "waveout", and always has a latency of at least 250ms).
 
At that point, I was not sure, if a nice and easy solution could be found at all... till i tried out SFML. It's meant to be a modern replacement for SDL. It's written in C++ (but has complete C-Bindings) and the project looks very alive. As usual, triggered sounds on Windows XP were being played with a lag. But the people at the SFML forums were quite helpful and suggested using the svn version. That version works fine both on Linux and Windows XP. So, after a long and painful search, Joyride Laboratories proudly presents the sound library, that we will most probably use:
 
SMFL 2.0
 
That is, if it also works nicely on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X.