I know, I know.  You haven't gotten seen any new press about my game in a while and you're craving it.  Well, while I can't give you any new screenshots I can at least give you a new article with a few of the recent design changes.  Not all of the recent design changes, but a fair number.

IGN looks at Empire Earth III

Notice there's absolutely no mention of multiplayer world domination mode any more?  Sigh.

We finally finished crunching for alpha at work, sending off an alpha build to our publisher either today or some time next week.  Our team is going to start shrinking in size and it's going to be a whole lot of bug fixing a polish between now and our gold master candidate later this summer.

One of the side effects of crunching for a month is that I get some extra time off.  Combine these freebie days with an already overabundance of PTO days (not to mention a tax return burning a whole in my pocket) and you got yourself a little something I like to call vacation.

What better way to take a break from the stress of work than to head back to the city of my birth (and higher education) for some Jazz Fest, sailing, food, and friends?  So, on that note, I will be in New Orleans from April 28th until May 8th.  I'm planning on going to at least two days of Jazz Fest in that time, doing some sailing, and catching THEM's end of the year concert.  The rest of my time, however, is currently open.  So, if you'd like to hang out while I'm in town then let me know!

Seriously, I can't wait.

A week or two ago at work I was requested to create some sort of über cheat, since QA was getting tired of having to type in 20 cheats to test stuff.  So I created a do-it-all cheat which I called Super Cheat.  In the process of making our game multi-threaded our entire cheat system broke, and people bemoaned the Death of Super Cheat.

Today I spent my day rewriting our cheat system, and in doing so enlarged the Super Cheat mythos.  Deciding that any hero who comes back from the dead needs strong villains to fight I created Cheat Cheathor, arch-nemesis of Super Cheat!  Since he is evil he doesn't help you, but hurts everyone else.  I also created Cheatonite, a way to turn off Super Cheat.

However, in setting up these new cheats I had a ton of other cheat ideas which, sadly, would take a while to actually implement (and since I'm behind schedule I don't have that time).  I thought I'd share a few, just so you can see how dorky I am:

Cheat of Steel - tech up and turn on god mode
Jimmy Cheatsen - takes a screenshot every 10 seconds
Mxycheatlk - All of your units are randomly changed to some other unit type

And, probably the dorkiest:
Cheatboy - fundamentally the same as Super Cheat, though able to move enemy units with his tactile telekinesis.  However watch out, because Cheatboy is half Super Cheat, but also half Cheat Cheathor!  There is a small possibility that when you call on Cheatboy for help he will instead be controlled by Cheathor and hurt your own units.

Sadly none of these will probably make it into the shipped game.  Ah well.