Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

Since you don't really have a choice I'll start with the bad news. It's no secret that we have a small team (effectively only a programmer and an artist) and we're totally independent - which is great in many ways, but sadly it also means we have no funding. I've worked full-time for years to pay the rent etc., and now Fivemagics have had to take a full-time job also, and naturally, will have less time to work on the project.

The good news is that we are not canceling development of WOF. We are not even thinking about canceling it. We will have to cut some corners and probably lower our ambitions in some areas, and while we have worked on it for a long time already, we wil have to work on it a little longer than we hoped for still.

Sometimes its good to be reminded of why we started to work on the project in the first place. We wanted full ownership which we could only get by being fully independent and carry all the expenses ourselves. Sadly we're not even remotely wealthy, so - while we're sad to not be able to work full-time on the game - we're happy that we still have a lot of inspiration and desire to finish the job. We can only hope that you will have continued patience with us and that you will like the game once its ready.

Que Sera, Sera.

I haven't been around much lately. I'm suffering from strep throat and have been very sick for two weeks now. Fever, Pain in my throat and neck (swallowing and swollen glands) - penicillin destroyed my stomach - and 'finally' I got back and neck pain from lying down too much.. Headaches almost gone now and I'm back at work.. These last weeks have been pure hell for me.. Naturally - sadly - this means no work have been done, but like we say here in our team: 'real life wins' for better or for worse.

The Kimera Studios site has been updated with a new look and logo.. Click the preview image below to go to the main site..

Tonight we made a build available for a few selected testers, and now we're anxiously awaiting feedback - hopefully mostly positive, and hopefully no hardware/software related bugs either! Time will tell.

Even though it's only an early test bulid I'm almost too excited to sleep, but I'm also very tired, and I know that goes for Fivemagics too.. Still, it's a normal work-day tomorrow, so I better find my way to my tooth brush and after that my bed. Bye for now..

The final week of my vacation is drawing to an end and things have gone differently than I expected, meaning that I have spent most of my time on 'family stuff/real vacation' rather than working on WOF, but I think this is about to change; it has been a long summer - almost without any football on tv and I feel I've been missing some inspiration - we're at a time where a lot of the things are already decided and designed but also where a lot of things depend on us finishing the crucial basic stuff that everything else is built upon. Fivemagics made great progress before going on vacation and with him gone for a few more weeks I'm happy that the football season is finally underway with lots of entertainment to come.

We're keeping a close eye on the development of other football games also, new iterations of PES and FIFA will be coming soon - but judging on what we've seen so far it seems that there's still room for WOF as what Konami and EA are offering isn't radically new or even close to what we're doing.

We're of course aware that not much is happening on our site and forum but that's just the way it is - I just want to assure any doubters that we're still here and doing our stuff..

Its summer time and I have a vacation coming up. Two weeks where I hope to spend a lot more time on WOF than have been possible lately; my 'real' job and private issues have taken all my energy but with some rest I hope to catch up.

I'm still fighting with the GUI (menu design), trying to find something that's functional and also nice to look it.. so far I'm not happy with it and I've been through what feels like hundreds of iterations. The battle goes on until we're all happy with it. I guess its both a curse and a blessing not having a final deadline to meet - we have the opportunity to make it just like we want it but it also allows us to fiddle with it forever.. A little more discipline on my part would be a good thing I guess! =)

Fivemagics is updating the collisions and we're adding more objects to the game world; substition benches, commercial boards and eventually the whole stadium will be there also. As soon as we feel its worth showing we'll make a movie available here.

There's a real annoying bug at our forum that prevents people from registering. Updating PHP and Apache haven't solved it and we also went back to a previous version of the phpbb but the bug didn't go away. We're still working on a solution for this problem.

As always we're doing the best we can as fast as we can, and even though things may seem too quiet you'll have to trust me that development of the game is still very much in progress and that we're going to keep at it for as long as it takes!

I've had 5 days off of work, thursday - monday both days included, and they've been put to good use working on new stadium graphics, and also a nice site update if you ask me. Somehow we didn't get invited to any Easter family lunches and didn't invite people over either - which is unusual in my family, even though most of us aren't religious. I've posted some images of the new stadium at our forum.

I also think I've finally put the words together that describe how WOF will be different from PES/FIFA and the old skool SWOS and KO. The old introduction have been bugging me for so long that I'm glad I finally got it changed - judging on early feedback it seems to go down well with the few people I've discussed it with. You can read it on our front page and judge for yourself..

Its incredibly how time flies though. Recently I've had a few discussions, with people on other football gaming forums, about the progress of WOF and how it seems like nothing is happening - someone even dared to call it vapourware. In hindsight WOF was announced too early perhaps - but then again, had I not announced it Fivemagics would have never heard of it and we wouldn't have been here today
- and I must stress a lot is happening, people just seem to forget that we're effectively a two man team trying to do a full game - in our spare time. I hate making these comments, as it feels to me like I'm making excuses when I'm actually damn proud of how far we've come - and its as if the game, as we've imagined it, is hiding just around the corner.

Now the short Easter vacation is over and its back to work in the morning. The first day after a weekend is always tough. As usual I immedieately slip into a bad sleeping pattern when I have a few days off, and its always payback time come monday, and sometimes also tuesday and even wednesday.. Anyway, we're just grinding on, doing the best we can as fast as we can. Soon we'll be around the corner and we can start to work our way towards the next!

Happy days!

With the server trouble we experienced recently we lost all data from the original blog (server went down right before the blog was included in the back-up). - but now its back up and running again, and we'll soon start adding more content to it..