City Block Progress Update

Back in May, I announced City Block, my latest major project. However, I have not released that much information about it since then, so here's a progress update:

First of all, I have almost completed the game. I sent out the first release candidate to a few friends who have agreed to beta test the game last week, and I hope to have the second release candidate out by the end of this week. I was able to finish the game this quickly thanks to my decision to develop it in Game Maker Studio, a rapid development tool that handles most of the back end stuff, such as graphics rendering and keyboard/mouse input, automatically. It is an incredibly full featured and easy to use game engine. I highly recommend it. That said, it does have a few problems. Some of the graphics functions cause games created with it to crash on Windows XP. Unfortunately, City Block uses some of these functions, and there is nothing I can do to fix Game Maker Studio. I have to wait until YoYo Games, the developer behind Game Maker Studio, fixes these issues. Therefore, City Block will be launching without support for Windows XP. If the issues with Game Maker Studio are ever fixed, then I will release an updated build of City Block that adds Windows XP support. Until then, City Block will not run on Windows XP.

Despite the Windows XP issue, I still plan to launch City Block soon, hopefully by the end of this month. The game is nearly feature complete. I have one or two more things to add and a bit of polishing to do, then Release Candidate 2 is off to the beta testers. I'll fix the problems they find, if any, and then it's time for release. Until then, here's the trailer: