All of my projects start out as solo endeavors, but one way or another they eventually turn into a team effort. Thanks to an excellent group of private testers and some new additions to the design team, NEStalgia is coming along extremely well.

tenkuu (SpSpiff) has been helping out on my projects for a long time; at one point he pretty much took over the original Proelium, spending months refining the gameplay and optimizing the code base. More recently, tenkuu took on the challenge of integrating his Proelium map editor into Proelium II and cleaning up/adding several more features that players were pining for. Apart from his coding and design help, he's a relentless 'bug hunter', and is invaluable to the testing process.

...So it was awesome when tenkuu not only volunteered to help with NEStalgia, but agreed to take on coding many of the remaining "systems" that I haven't got around to yet. I've been able to spend the last couple weeks focusing on game content while tenkuu has been tackling stuff like this:


A classic NES-style naming system and an item bank/gold vault just to name a few. The funny thing is that although he is working off of my existing code base, tenkuu is a much better coder than I am. Luckily he's kind enough to explain/comment pretty much everything he does so that I don't go back and get confused later on.

Jared (who many of you know as Jaredoggy or Balzack) is always there to help with mapping as well. He's also the source of many of the awesome in-game events that used to make DWO a blast; and I'm sure that the Balzackians will rise again upon NEStalgia's release.

Last but not least, the excellent group of people who having been testing NEStalgia have been writing up detailed bug reports and thoughtful suggestions for improvement. Most of these players are "DWO Oldbies", and they know a thing or two about old school RPGs. Scar has been kind enough to run the private testing server so far, which has been a huge help.

If you were to compare the original private testing compile of NEStalgia to what we have on our hands less than a month later, you'd barely recognize it. Thanks to the Silk Games team, NEStalgia will be taking BYOND by storm in the near future.