Love Battlestar Galactica? Want to meet the soundtrack composer at Comic-Con? Our Dark Void soundtrack composer Bear McCreary was a guest blogger today on the Dark Void site and he gives you all the juicy details on how you can meet him and Senior Producer Morgan Gray. Head on over to the DV blog now and check it out.

Hey guys,

Jason Hail, our intrepid AI programmer over @ Airtight, has written a small peek at Dark Void through the lense of AI. Here it is…

Howdy, Jason Hail checking in. I’m the Senior AI programmer at Airtight Games working on Dark Void. This last year has been a whirlwind of activity for us AI guys, and let me tell you: this game is big! We have ground combat, vehicular combat, aerial jet-pack based combat, vertical combat and some more surprises I can’t even talk about yet. One of the big challenges for me is to keep a handle on all of the different elements we have in order to stay focused on the core gameplay mechanics that make Dark Void great. It helps to look at the games that inspired Dark Void, and to pick apart what made them work. There’s one common thread I found in those games: great gameplay comes from iteration. You think really hard about how to make something fun. You polish the idea for months in your head. Then you try it in game. And, sadly, as great as it was in your head . it sucks to play. So, you have to start again. You come up with a better idea. A bit more cautiously, you try it in game. It no longer sucks; now it’s even kind of fun. So you refine it, let others play it, tune it based on their feedback. Now it’s even more fun. And so on, until you have a final product that absorbs the player from the moment they press START. Diagram 1. My highly scientific diagram of the evolution of awesome game play. Those first 4 steps can repeat for quite a long time.