50% funded! In 9 hours. Completely amazing response so far. Keep it up guys!

Looks like there’s already a good article about this on Kotaku.

Dang, $30K in a half hour. That’s quite a jump! I think over a thirty day span that projects to something like… a trillion dollars?

Thank you to the 398 backers who have pledged, as of typing this.

You probably have lots of questions. First, if you’re unfamiliar with Kickstarter, you should probably check this page out to understand how making a pledge works.

http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/backers

Second, if you scroll to the bottom of our KS page, you’ll see an FAQ section. We’ll be adding questions to that as much as we can.

Thanks again to everyone for checking this out!

Hey, let’s spread this around!!! I am very pleased and proud to annou…

wait

what…

what is this

omg

Train of thought destroyed.

Wait! Before you try it: PLEASE CLEAR YOUR BROWSER CACHE!

What’s been happening I think is some people reporting issues with new versions have had some older program files in their cache, so the thing runs like a weird frankenstein version, and it’s hard to tell what are new problems and what are old.

We haven’t really started on the next update yet, since we’ve been spending all our time debugging. This is like a beta testing phase, but the test group is the entire readership. Normally software doesn’t get released til it clears this phase, but it wasn’t really worth holding back for any longer than it was already. It worked for probably 90-95% of browsers/systems out there.

If you had issues with it previously, feel free to report your results to the forum thread again, or reblogging this and typing your result below is ok too. We’ll be able to see it in the notes.

If you were one of those people who could load the game, but Meenah was stuck in the first frame, give it another try. Patch might have helped.

(if it still doesn’t work, might help to clear your cache of old files to be extra sure you’re running the fresh version)

If you were having problems with the game, you might want to try it again and see what happens. The patch probably won’t fix everything for everyone, but it should address some problems.

If you had issues with it, it would also be helpful if you reported what your problem was, and what the result is now, in this forum thread.

http://mspaforums.com/showthread.php?50126-Problems-with-the-latest-update

If you played the recent update, it would be a big help if you could fill out this survey on the game’s performance. This will help us fix remaining issues for the next couple games.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DJP5Y8C

Thanks!

Some notes about the interactive beginning to A6 Intermission 3. (A walkthrough by Radiation.)

First, I’d originally planned to put more in the game than this, but it was running a bit long, so I decided to chop it up. I’m planning two more installments of this game, probably to be released over the next couple weeks. All the art assets and stuff is there, I just need to work with Alexis to crunch it all into a couple more new games.

Speaking of which, thanks to Alexis, MSPA’s tenured CODER OF GAMES, for working on this. It’s a little different. It’s the first time we’re not using Flash. Only the intro is Flash, but the game is coded in HTML5, which makes it a little more robust in some ways, but will have some issues with less common browsers. I’ve copied a note from him about it all here. Take note especially of browser info: best viewed in Chrome, Firefox is ok but not ideal, IE is very buggy and won’t show the Flash intro, and Opera/Safari aren’t tested at all.

Thanks to the artists (scroll to bottom) who worked on assets for this too. They’ve made a good deal more than you see here, which will appear in other installments. Thanks Stephen, Tanney, Peter, Amanda for making environment assets, and Chaz, Lexxy, Vivus, Xamag for the talking portraits. Special thanks to Amanda for making all the little walking sprites, as well as a whole lot of environment stuff and items. Everything looks really great.

And of course, thanks to contributing musicians (again scroll to bottom), and Toby for editing everything. Some things from the contest album Universe A, notably Fuscia Ruler by Sinister Psyche as the main song. See Toby’s post for more details.

Oh snap! Native HTML5 content? Hells yes! HTML5 still sucks by and large as the browser vendors bicker over standards, so I would advise you to use:

-Chrome if at all possible. Best functionality support and performance. Official platform.

-Firefox if that’s not possible. Good functionality, slower than chrome, bad audio performance. Officially supported nonetheless.

-Internet Explorer (minimum 9) if you’re desperate. It’s not officially supported, but other than the fact that ***the flash intro does not work in IE*** it seems to be working fine. (There is also a small bug where if you’re using IE, and your computer does not have an audio device, the entire app will fail to load, as sound files will not be downloaded, so plug in some headphones or even just a headphone jack attached to a wire).
-Opera and Safari quite simply have not been tested. I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked in them though, I used nothing browser specific.
-Lynx is supported, but only if you have an Oculus Rift.

Regardless of what you use, try to minimize the amount of stuff your browser/computer is also doing for optimal performance. Also update to the latest version of your browser and stop holding back HTML5 you asshole!

Best of all, it’s open source! (tentatively Apache licensed, so basically a free-for-all)

We’ve got a thread developing this project over here:  http://mspaforums.com/showthread.php?46219-Jterniabound 
It’s dead right now, but that’s because I went into super ninja development mode for this project. I’ll be pushing the latest source to Github when I get home from work today (~5 EST). There’s been a TON of changes to the API/codebase since I went into ninja mode, we’re working to the update the wiki as quick as possible. I’m also considering developing tutorials for developing a Sburb project. But the whole thing has been designed from the ground up so that, in theory, you don’t have to touch a drop of code. The entire game is described by a bunch of modular XML files (SburbML). Of course Andrew always has some crackpot feature that exceeds the scope of the project, but usually that just means I make the API bigger and more robust. Hooray!

Baked in features include:

Describing complex events and environments purely in XML

HTML5 audio (with fall back files for supporting mp3 and ogg)

Canvas and sprite-sheet based rendering 

Flash cutscenes (which are skipped if flash is not supported)

Ability to define custom fonts (allowing the specification of local fonts, with the ability to fall back to your own personally supplied fonts)
The ability to serialize almost any game state into a SburbML file, and load it back up again, for easy sharing
So much dialogue producing syntax you don’t even know. Only Andrew truly grasps the magnitude of syntax, and it is something I am sure he will always regret ever requesting.

Loading content on demand to minimize up front server impact and wait times

Note that between the XML files, dialogue syntax, and custom font support, any translators out there should have a breeze getting any translation done (except for the ultimate magnitude of the text found within)! No more decompiling SWFs for you!

This version will be snapshotted, but we’re gonna keep developing it. The dialogue parser/renderer (as well as the ACTUAL renderer, honestly) could likely be massively optimized, and there’s some features I want to add to the API. If you know anything about HTML5 and design, I’d love to get feedback (I’m avoiding including external libraries for the time being).

additional brief announcements.

server under massive strain after large update as usual. if it gets stuck loading, that’s way. try not to refresh excessively.

different rooms stream from the server, and also require load time. if it takes a while, again: due to server strain.

traffic will likely die down in several hours.