As many of you will already be aware, for the last couple of years my other half – known at SFC as Warlord IkitClaw – has been developing a Shining style game engine. The engine is called Tatakai and has been designed with customisability in mind, allowing anyone to easily build their on Shining Force style games. Who needs Shining Force NEO?! 😉
Today, a new version of Tatakai has been released to its team of testers, having undergone a whole host of updates since the previous release in June of last year. Vigorous testing has gone on at our end in advance of the test release, to iron out the worst of the bugs (not that there have actually been many) and to prepare a test campaign for play in Tatakai.
IkitClaw is working on a Tatakai campaign of his own, but due to the time required to create graphics, sounds and all the other necessary resources he has decided not to hold up the release for it. Instead he is bundling my campaign with the test version, and working on his campaign in his spare time (Tatakai development itself is of course taking priority).
The engine is coming along in leaps and bounds and really is at a stage that could be considered complete aside from bug testing – however, we like to go that extra mile and so there are a bunch of new features planned for the next release too!
If you’ve got a bit of free time on your hands to play through a Tatakai campaign a few times to check for bugs (e.g. by trying out odd combinations of events in-game, trying to perform actions which ought not to be possible), and can be sure you’ll keep in touch about any problems you find, suggestions, compliments etc then why not head along to the Tatakai website to find out more about the system and how to sign up to be a tester?