Well I managed to skip a whole month of blog updates, but better late than never right?

I may not have been blogging much but I *have* been working, I promise! The network back end for the Dodeka match making service has been really taking shape. I say the "Dodeka match making service" but as I suggested in the previous post the "Heavenly Software match making service" is more accurate as its designed to do the work for all games I make. At the moment it is going simply under the name HNET but I am open to suggestions :)

The service is currently providing game discovery and live chat for Dodeka as well as some essential services like NAT punch through. It also has a decent framework for providing Achievement like services which I'm umming and ahhing about adding - if you have an opinion on that then do drop me a line! There is also potential for things like competitions and ladders in the future but due to the work involved that would be considered AFTER a successful release if the game seemed popular enough to merit the investment.

So, pushing the boring network updates out the way let me move on to the game. Sadly it's almost as dull as network chat as most of the work over the past month has been on GUI features as I attempt to craft a system that is a lot more fluid and quick to navigate - I know one of the major failings of Duodecad is the GUI was quite clunky and not always clear. It's worth the time investment, I promise :)

I have also invested a fair chunk of extra time rewriting a lot of code to not depend on XNA so much anymore. Infact the ultimate goal is that the Dodeka engine does not actually know what XNA is despite the fact it uses it for all it's rendering etc. This move was made after I received a very welcome message from a fan on facebook who said they really enjoyed Duodecad and wanted to know if Dodeka would also be on Xbox. Now, I can't promise that it will be. But it did prompt me to start thinking about other platforms that people use and how I can bring the game to them.

Properly abstracting certain parts of the engine will make this "possible" but not guaranteed. But I *DO* want to bring Dodeka to as many platforms as possible (including mac, linux, consoles and tablets) so to make sure I have a good fighting chance of doing that I'm laying down the ground work now. However when it comes to the consoles there are additional licensing fees and usually dev kits required etc so just having code that "will probably work" does not mean I will manage to push to that specific platform!

As always, it's not only me that has been working. Elin is still drawing away - mostly concentrating on the GUI as that is where I have put the focus at the moment but also bringing new cards to me!

So as a little treat to make up for my lazy blogging habbits here is a look at the latest one I was sent:



and a link to the high resolution version: here

This is one of the new level 10 cards that you'll see in Dodeka. One of the new features the game will have is that any card can be potentially be found as a rare "foil" card - it's going to be interesting to see how these look on shiny backgrounds!

Let us know what you think through facebook or twitter. I'll try to blog a bit sooner next time!