After a few weeks out of the office (E3, then Italy, then F.3.A.R this weekend (great game!)), I’m finally back in the office. The chair is a lot more comfortable than I remember, and the office is overflowing with irony. While I was gone, we’ve hired another graphics artist to help out with Scrolls, Mattis (@bomuboi on twitter), and two more potential employees are being talked to. More news on that when we’ve signed them.

Me and Jens have been independently working on stuff for the adventure update, and it’s been growing in scope as we’ve been working on it. That means it will take quite some time to finish, but that it will hopefully change the game a lot to the better. To prevent going too far between updates, we’ve decided to release Pistons early.

That means 1.7 will be released soon, containing only pistons and probably a couple of bug fixes. The adventure update will take however long it takes, and will be released as 1.8. It might be a long wait, but it will be worth it!

After 1.8, we’ll have to start crunching for the full release in November. That includes finishing up the mod api, improving stability and performance, adding supporting features like friends lists and a proper server browser, integrating singleplayer and multiplayer, and most importantly fleshing out the gameplay.

The release date is almost certainly changed to sometime the week after 11/11/11, and we’re working hard on setting that up. We want to make a big spectacle out of the release where we involve fans and celebrate it properly.

Then we’ll rest for a few weeks. Then I’ll start working on the first post-release update.