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WOW! I can't believe it!! Kollectiv is FREAKING DONE!

You can't download it yet though, but soon, read the whole post to find out why!

What many of you may not understand is aside from some really simple stuff in the past, this really is my first fully fledged completed game. I came close with another once before in c++, but it never got any of the polish.. I might port it to XNA though.. heh

I've put a hell of a lot of work into this game, and I hope it shows to those that may download it soon. There's a few minor things I need to do still, such as update all the credits on the credits screen.. AND I need to add the support for the XBOX 360 controller on the gameplay screen.. other than that, I think I'm done.. I'm also going to try out Nicks EasyZip for the first time to compress it down some more.. It's at 139 meg right now, I'd like to shrink it a bit more... I know I can knock another 40 megs off just the textures alone by RAR'ing them, not sure how well zip will do.

Tonight I got the arcade and timer modes added in, which was 10 times simpler than I had first thought, and saved myself a lot of duplicate code too. I threw some more polish on it as well, added a timer countdown sound, playfield size alarm, and a few other odds and ends.

One small issue is that I do not have a 360 controller to test with.. so I'm going to do that blind, but my biggest dilemma is how to package it all up. I have looked at those threads and scripts on the XNA forums for the installers, and they all still look like Greek to me.. But I guess I will figure it out.

I'm hoping to be sending this to a few people by Sunday to test out on their systems. One thing I realized I didn't do is time based movement. I'm updating the block position every frame, so I will probably go back in and rework all of that really quick.

Also, I used the Game State Management Sample and right now for some reason, whenever you quit the game, go back to the menu, start a new game, quit, etc.. it starts to REALLLLLLY bog down.. I think its because I'm not unloading everything I loaded.. the unload function is just the default content.unload().. I think I need to kill off all the resources I created.. Not sure, but I think.. If you know, TELL ME please!

All in all, I'm hoping to release the final version to the public August 2nd or 3rd. I work the next 7 days in a row, and have a 4 day weekend the 1st through 4th, so that should give me the time to tweak anything necessary and get it out there!!!

I just want to say thank you to all of those I have pestered on the forums, Nick, ZMan and more than I can remember for their help and for putting up with me.. It's been worth it I think though!

I'll update the Kollectiv website with the new screenshots this weekend as well!

If you have any tips or tutorials on setting up a good (free) installer with XNA, please email me!!