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Alas, things hardly ever go as planned when it comes to managing a community mapping project. The original plan was to finish up testing and updates and then release Claustrophobia 1024 to the public on March 28th. I misjudged how long it was going to take to do all of the testing and tweaking when I set that date though. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a lot of experience with single player type maps either; if this were DM or multiplayer, testing would probably have been done by now . I now know that when it comes to polishing and testing singleplayer or COOP type maps, you need to make a little more headroom in the project’s schedule to account for testing. Lesson learned

At the moment the release date is set for April 5th. It’s very likely that it will be bumped up again because testing is still sorta in progress (ugh) and there are a handful of authors that aren’t around to heed any of the feedback that’s being given for the maps that they contributed. Meaning that either I or someone on the testing team will have to make the fixes. That can be a problem sometimes because you don’t always know if the original author is working on the map presently or if they are planning to. Which means that if someone other than the original author makes changes, it’s very likely that you’ll end up with two versions of the same map. It can be a bit of a mess but that happens when a project has been in production for a long time; some of the original contributors send in something and as the project chugs on into the months, they lose interest or contact with the progress that’s being made. Then sometimes it’s a struggle to get in contact with said persons to update their maps or get information, etc. I’m also waiting on some new music tracks for two of my maps that are being composed by my very good buddy Jimmy91 (I hear that school has been treating him pretty rough ). Hopefully he can pull through and make something that sounds wonderful though! ….oh, and I also need to sucker someone into making a new CREDIT pic (something similar to the one that can be found in Congestion 1024 would be super).

It’s always those little things that stall or delay a project. And I never seem to see them coming . But all of that aside, once we’re finally finished I think we’ll have something that a lot of folks will really enjoy playing. I anticipate that this will be ready for release very soon; once I have a deadline that I know I can stick to, I’ll be sure to make another post about it