Attack of the clones

With the release date pressing hard on our shoulders we're all getting pretty exited. This excitement is very double sided though. We know the game is good enough to be released, but all the other stuff isn't quite... We have no promo video yet, the logo still has no sound, blogposts need to be written, and the game still has some serious balancing issues. We're under quite some pressure.
On the other hand, we've been working hard past few weeks, and we really want to show what we've got! What's weeks of work worth when there's no glory at the end? From the beginning we've been aiming for the first prize, and though we've really had some setbacks, we still think we should keep optimistic, and aim for the highest.

So, lets have a little recap of the entire process we've went through. We started off with 5 members, a team of inexperienced students. It took us so long to come up with a good name for our company that we decided to take a break when it came to naming, but we never really picked that up. Result? Two days before release we still don't have a name for the game.
As slow as we were with naming, we made up with a quick decision about the game itself. It didn't take long before we all agreed on the genre and the concept. We started quickly, and made some very decent progress in the first two weeks. We made the choice to use a library for the UI and we had a working lobby pretty quickly. Everything seemed to be going perfectly.
Then came the Christmas holidays, development slowed down since those two weeks are always very busy. Communication didn't go too good, and at that moment we first felt that we lost a team member. Ivar didn't respond to messages, wasn't active in the skype call, and didn't work any more. Very demotivating for all of us, so development went even slower. Luckily there was a meeting somewhat weeks after the holidays that shook us awake. We saw that we had gotten behind and we really needed to get going again! And so we did, we programmed 90% of the gameplay in one and a half week, and now here we are. I'm writing this blogpost, Siemen is laying his hands on the very last points of the gameplay, tomorrow we'll do all the balancing, and the day after tomorrow the game will be released.

We want to thank everybody that helped us, gave feedback in any way, all the wonderful people on the internet and their great tutorials. We want to thank Arno Kamphuis in special, for his useful advice and neutral feedback. We've learned a lot, may it be programming skills, or social teambuilding skills.