Weekly Penguin
August 18th, 2009

More work, looking forward

If you're wondering where is the much-anticipated next Making of TAGAP 2 entry, I simply haven't had the time to turn it into HTML form during past two week. Heck, I've had very little time for TAGAP 2, which is kinda sad, but its all for a good reason; I've got a new job. Well, its technically the previous job again, but still.

Don't be alarmed, my current employment doesn't affect TAGAP 2 production much, except for these first couple of weeks. As I've mentioned earlier, I've been unemployed about six months and getting back to full-time job schedule takes some time for me. I've always been like that, even back in school days, when first weeks after summer holiday were almost painful in terms of getting back into whole new life rhythm.

As for the website updates, there just might be more of them ahead than usual, as I tend to spend my lunch breaks on that field (like as of writing this post). When I'm working on anything, TAGAP or otherwise, I tend to lose track of time and thus the updates have been pretty sparse. Now I have a scheduled break, so I might as well used for something productive.

On more interesting semi-news front, we just recently recorded footage for the debut trailer. Every bit of gameplay we had finished until two weeks ago was captured in full-resolution glory and now it's mainly a matter of narrowing down what moments we want to show in the video premiere. We have no schedule carved in stone for this one as actual game production is the priority as usual, but it's definitely coming somewhere in not-too-distant future.

And as if that wasn't enough, a few weeks ago me and Petja had a little brainstorming session about what awaits after TAGAP 2. Several awesome ideas were born, a couple of them TAGAP-related and rest of them brand new. Take note that we haven't decided any direction yet nor will we start producing anything until TAGAP 2 is out in the wild, this was just a brainstorming session about all the possibilities.

However, one thing was decided right out of the gate; No matter what the follow-up to TAGAP 2 will be, it might be an episodic release. We were pretty sure TAGAP 2 production wouldn't take more than two years, but thanks to the absolutely crazy amount of detail that goes into it, that schedule turned out to be over-optimistic. As much as we love playing and developing relatively long, high-quality, the two-to-three year cap between the releases isn't that necessarily good for us or the gamers. Once TAGAP 2 is wrapped, we'll start planning how to approach episodic concept.

And finally, PenguinDT is now on Twitter! Just head to Twitter.com and add PenguinDT to your followed tweets. Our Twitter page will take a triple-duty of sorts, combining the much-requested RSS-feed and newsletters and spicing things up with random quotes from the highway to penguin world domination. Thusly, unlike with our previous social site implementations, we're planning to do frequent updates. And if you were wondering why not naming our Twitter feed TAGAP for easier reference; Believe it or not, that name was already taken (no hard feelings).

But now the lunch break is nearing its end and its time to go back to paid work.

Until next time,

Jouni Lahtinen, the head penguin