As the title says, I've been on sick leave for this week with a bad cold. I'll try to answer the new shots and comments (of which there seem to be plenty, thanks a lot!) early next week.

Matti Delahay
Lead Designer & Community Manager
Iron Sky: Operation Highjump

We're on vacation this week, we'll be back on 2nd of January. Hope you've enjoyed the Holidays and will have a very Happy New Year!

Best wishes,
Matti Delahay on behalf of the Highjump team

[Edit: I wrote this update last week, but couldn't post it before now because of Wreckamovie downtime. Sorry for the delay!]

Sorry again for the quiet spell - to balance it out, in this update I'll try to go into a bit more detail on the work we've done lately.

Progress on the latest milestone
As I've mentioned in earlier updates, for the last few months we've been working on the first proper playable parts of the game. Here's a by-no-means-complete list of features that were on the requirement list for the current version:
- Level geometry, textures, lighting and furniture for first playable areas
- Basic pathfinding code
- All needed basic and special animations that were still missing (+ some updates on old ones after testing)
- The first couple of character models & faces
- Implementing all GUI elements (e.g. interface for look/pick up/interact -actions, inventory screen, character screen, dialogue history, map, all HUD elements and the actual dialogue screen)
- Movement, controls and UI
- Camera placement and movement + player camera controls
- Loads of basic functionality, such as:
-> Skill system
-> Inventory system
-> Dialogue system
-> Underlying functionality for the save/load system
-> Containers, doors and other interactive objects in the environment
- ...and obviously a whole lot of testing and bug fixing -

Apart from a complete lack of sounds and music and a handful of bugs yet to be fixed, this milestone has been reached. It's not long yet - just the first few minutes of the Soldier campaign (or significantly less depending on your selections during the intial dialogue) - but it has certainly been an excellent testing platform on various features of the game proper, and should also provide some good material for some community testing in the future. :)

Next milestone
Now that the actual content for the previous milestone is finished, we're already hard at work on the next one. This one will be a slightly longer and overall larger demo that will feature another main character, much wider playable area and generally more content and functionality. While the first demo focused on putting together the basic movement and environmental interaction, the second one will tag on new challenges such as the combat system and advanced dialogue features as well as some more complex story arcs to test it all out with.

Work on this version is proceeding nicely - we've already got most of the basic functionality for the combat system down (moving, weapon use, basic combat AI and turn system being some of the central ones).

New screenshot
To top the update up, here's our first proper in-game screenshot! I posted an earlier low-res version in Facebook earlier when waiting for WAM to get back on its feet, but in this one you can probably get a better picture of the look of the game. The shot is from the very beginning of the Soldier storyline, right after the intro sequence.

And no, "debug skip" option won't be present in the final version. :P

I planned to post a new longer status update today about our progress lately, but looks like I caught a stomach flu and will be missing work today. I'll do my very best to get it up tomorrow.

Long story short, the major milestone we were working on is pretty much finished (apart from missing audio and some known bugs yet to be ironed out) and early October we started work on the next one, which will feature the combat system for the first time, as well as another playable character.

For your reference, we've posted a master list of models we've made (or received from the community) so far. The list is currently not up-to-date and is missing a bunch of models made during the last couple of months. Some of the models were also made with the specs of the old engine in mind, so some work is required to improve the textures and, in some cases, geometry. Still, the list should give some sort of idea of the stuff we've already got. I'm also hoping to find time for both updating this one and building a master list of models we still need so community modelers would find it easier to pick interesting models to work on. I'm planning to start work on the list later this week, as soon as I finish the scene camera point update I'm working on at the moment.

You can find the list here:
http://www.wreckamovie.com/tasks/show/2326