Last year was a very good one for gamers. We might not have played the best games ever made, but I have to say some very nice titles were released in 2004. I think this year is going to be another rocking game-year and now Lionhead Studios will be even more involved! As the games industry is expanding very rapidly, with more and more games in development, it’s important – especially as an independent developer - to stay innovative and original. The Bureau of Labor has predicted that the growth of software publishing - of which video game design is a big part - will expand by 67.9% between 2002 and 2012. This is the fastest growing industry across all sectors. And, with our upcoming games, the Lionhead-slice of the pie will grow fast as well.

But what’s going on in the development of The Movies? Quite a lot actually! The artists (animators, sets, props and scene designers) are expanding the collection of content to have more continuity in scenes, etc… for when you want to make your own script into a film. But it’s not just about selecting a few sets and dropping some actors in. To make a good movie you’ll need a nifty lot so you can research technology like coloured film or camera techniques to improve the quality of your next picture.

When you have a Design Team - comprising of people like Mark Webley, Stephen Hood, Ollie Purkiss, Ben Huskins, Tom Hooper, Adrian Moore and Peter Molyneux – you can expect some (and sometimes a great many) very nice ideas for new features popping up during the development of the game. The Coders - like Cliffski from the Lionhead Boards – are very busy implementing those new ideas and mechanics into The Movies. I’ll give more details and even screenshots of the new features in one of the next Community Updates.

What can we expect when the community engine starts running at full power? As Sam said in his latest diary, we’re planning a DevChat on IRC Quakenet, involving plenty of key people, to answer your questions. He also wrote us an IRC guide for it and they now have a new bot on the channel to make things easier and more organized during those DevChats. If you want to join the rest of the community in #lionhead, read through the IRC-guide. You’re more than welcome to join! If you have any more questions about this you can send me an email or post in on our boards. We’re also working (well, mainly Mad King Georg is working) on the forums to make them faster, but this is not as easy as everyone thinks because the speed of the board is affected by many different factors like software and the capacity of the server.

This is the first of many Community Updates I will be writing for you. More detailed info about the gameplay, making movies and The Movies itself will follow in upcoming installments. For now you can enjoy the new screenshots and let us know what you think of them on the Lionhead Boards.

Woody, Community Manager