Gitah Studios The team making a K-On! themed beat 'em up game.

This is what you came here for.

Well,  part of it, most of this blog post will be me talking about the writing of the game, but it'll also include pictures of the game running in it's current state.

Yes, proof of progress. It has been a while coming, but trust us, there is progress going on, it is just hard to keep you guys updated without slowing ourselves down a lot.

So, where is the game engine at? Well, don't expect too much right now. We probably have about 75% of it implemented - which is great. There is still a lot of engine to write though, and after that, we still have to use the engine to construct the game, but it is getting there. Remember that these screenshots show a completely unpolished development version of the game, using placeholder images and the like, so don't be dissapointed it doesn't look awesome - that is coming later.

Click 'Continue Reading' if you want more than pictures.

So how does the development go? The work on the engine is all organised into a central repository - the Mercurial system - it's a great bit of software and really helps collaboration. It's helped us keep the code base in it's current format, which is extremely well documented, commented and structured. The code is all kept to a common style and it's really robust - it's a great grounding that means development won't slow down in the future. We are still a community project, and as such are not strict about what we are working on, it's mostly just whatever takes your fancy at the time - something which has worked surprisingly well. Most of the development happens in flurrys, then a while with less activity.

Most of what we do is co-ordinated in our IRC channel - if you havn't done so, start idling our main channel #k-on-game on Rizon (check the link at the top of this page if you havn't used IRC before). IRC is where you can really follow what we are doing, and just chat about... most things. The channel is pretty active 24/7 at the moment, with the numbers hanging at around 40 people in the channel at any given time - so you won't find it hard to start a conversation. You can also stalk our twitter feed, which should be updated a little more often than this blog, with smaller stuff.

I'd like to note that although I run Linux, the game should be availible on Windows, Linux and OS X, although we havn't got any testers on staff for the latter yet, but when the time comes, I'm sure we'll find a way. The game should run on most systems - I can't see it being particularly demanding, and we'll have a few options to reduce load where we can.

So yes, hopefully you've got a bit of an insight into where we are, and I think we are no longer purely vapourware ;).

Happy New Year.