Well, it's been over a year since my last news post. I bet you all thought I was dead or something. I am very much alive, here's what happend: Shortly after releasing Kong v1.1.0 I got hired to work at Free Radical Design on the game TimeSplitters 4. I lost my motivation to work on Kong since I was programming games as a day-job. I felt bad because I'd promised more regular releases and that didn't happen so I went into hiding. After 6 months the company went into administration and I had to look for a new job.

I started thinking about what to do next, I decided not to apply for another games programming job and went back to an engineering job instead. That would leave me more time to work on my own game projects. So I thought about going back to work on Kong but I felt like starting something fresh. That's when I decided to port it to the Xbox 360 using the XNA platform. Up until recently console game development has been an area restricted gaming professionals, I was keen to get involved as a hobbyist.

So I slowly but surely starting the task of rewriting Kong for the Xbox360 using the XNA platform. I kept rather quiet about this because I didn't want to make any promises I couldn't keep. I heard about the Dream Build Play challenge and decided to enter the competition. I just finished submitting what I've called Kong360, one of the requirements was to make a video of the game. I wanted to share the video with everybody, you can find it here on youtube.

Unfortunately I didn't quite manage to get all the features of the PC version into the 360 version, I had to drop the map editor, networked multiplayer, team deathmatch & ragdolls. However there is a new tutorial mode and split screen mode playable up to 4 players on the same console. I do plan to add networking to the game and various other game modes for release as an Xbox360 community game when it's ready.

Also, I've registered the domain name http://www.kong360.com which currently just redirects to this website. At some point I'll make kong360.com the default one because I think it's easier to remember. Anyway, I hope you like the video and if you've got an Xbox360 hopefully you'll be able to play Kong360 on it soon :).

Well folks, it's finally here! Version 1.1.0 is now available for download in the downloads section. I know it's been a long time since the last release (almost 6 months) so I'd like to thank everybody for being patient. The reason for the long wait is that I embarked on quite a few major changes all in one go and it has taken this long to finish them all off. In future I will concentrate on one thing at a time and try to make more regular releases. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Please come visit the forum to leave your comments.

One thing I should mention is that the Kong Patcher has been removed for various reasons. So please download the installer to get a fresh copy of the game. If you have created any maps that you would like to keep then it would be a good idea to back these up before upgrading. To do this just copy the "maps" subdirectory to somewhere safe.

Here's your chance to show off your Kong skills, the CSCup LAN party hosted in Namur, Belgium will include a Kong deathmatch tournament. There are some prizes to be won and a chance to meet our art director kiwi :). So if you live in the area it's well worth checking it out. It will take place on the 28, 29 and 30th of March, good luck!

I'm pleased to announce that Roland Shaw has joined the development team and is going to be our sound guy. He has already replaced almost all of the existing sounds in the game and created some new ones. You can listen to some of his previous work on his website: http://www.rolandshaw.com/. You will be able to listen to his creations in the next version of Kong. Speaking of which, it will be released as version 1.1 rather than 1.0.3 because there will be a considerable number of new features in this version, the main ones are:

• Re-coded the lightmapping algorithm to increase performance
• Added a new Jungle theme
  
• Re-designed the GUI, now using libRocket instead of CEGUI
• Added new coco-flash weapon which can be used to blind enemies
• Exploding monkeys (gibbed) when killed from an explosion

There are also a whole load of smaller changes that I won't list here but they'll be in the change log. I realise it has been a while since the last release but I hope the wait will be worth it. In the future I will try not to make so many changes at once so that smaller releases can be made more frequently.

Version 1.0.3 is coming along nicely, on the programming side I have been spending a lot of time optiming the game so hopefully if you've been getting bad frame rates this should be improved. The shadow generation code has been re-written and is now a lot faster.

On the art side of things, kiwi has been working on a new jungle theme which I think looks very nice. A new theme system has been implemented to support this, it is done in such a way that themes can be switched without needing to rebuild the map. The screenshots section has been updated to showing off parts of the new theme.

Here is a direct link to the first screenshot: