DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

Chapter 5: The Lagging Year

February 2002 - May 2003

by RambOrc

The beginning of 2002 saw the release of Korax Mod 2.1 (with support for the Hexen mission pack, Deathkings) and the arrival of 2 new team members, Mago and Janis. While we have been in contact with Janis for months before, as we intended to use his Vavoom engine for projects after Scattered Evil anyway, it was an important step when he finally decided to join the Korax team itself, taking the position of Lead Programmer from Camper and doing a great job with programming new features and fixing bugs in the code. Thanks to his higher knowledge of how wadfiles work, he also reorganized the project files, making for a less chaotic distribution pacakage.

Mago, a complete newcomer, stumbled upon our project somewhen in January, and got so excited he started creating new 2D graphics at once, which in turn made me excited once I saw them. He created several new NPCs and hundreds of special frames for the monsters and started work on new in-screen weapon and spell animations as well.

On the first birthday of KMOD (June 14), the version 2.2 with a bunch of bugfixes and smaller enhancements (like an all-lnew shop map) was released. This was intended as last release of KMOD ever, since it looked llike Scattered Evil would be out before the end of the year.

At around this time, the concept of damage skins was introduced and work on them started. Work went on swiftly throughout the Spring of 2002.

Starting Summer 2002, work suddenly started to lag, as all three then-active team members had an increased workload outside the project. As a result of this, progress slowed down to a crawl and the release date of Scattered Evil was postponed again and again.

This situation changed somewhat when a couple of new people joined the team, among them 2D artist Firebrand and programmer Moose. While work on Scattered Evil went on, it was still too slow to see the end of the road.