Today is the day we start testing the new web site! We’re going to send out e-mail to our playtesters and have them kick the tires. Once we think it’s solid, we’ll release it to the community publicly. It’s our hope and belief that this will be the last time the site goes down for any length of time (though of course we’ll have to perform maintenance on it from time to time, that’s on the matter of hours). In other site outage news, we’re not sure what happened to Readyroom.org, but they’ve missed their annual hosting fees in the past and I suspect it’s something like that but will let you know when we know.
Things are otherwise proceeding along, although life as a startup is always difficult. We recently attended another investor conference, where we did a small pitch and showed our trailers, artwork, etc. to as many people with money as we could. There seemed to be a lot more entrepreneurs there than investors, but we got a couple leads that we will follow up on.
In the meantime, big changes are afoot with NS:Source. It looks like a whole lot more work than even we anticipated and so we’re rethinking things. With our two big "competitors" (Counter-strike and Day of Defeat) both having a full-time professional team making them, we have a lot we’re up against. Of course, those two projects also got access to Half-life II before it was released. When it comes down to it, "porting" NS to Half-life II is really more of a rewrite, with all the art and levels being redone. We expect a lot of the code and game design to remain intact, but there are even chunks there that will need to be recreated. We’re currently trying to figure out a way we can get a top-quality NS:Source done in a reasonable amount of time with no funding. We’re talking to publishers and investors without a lot of luck yet. Anyone have any other ideas?