April 1998

• Prey Alpha available for download (Exclusive)

It looks like something has leaked out of the Prey offices.   An Alpha version of Prey!  This unfinished version of the game shows single player and gives us a little demo of MultiPrey. Get it!

• Update

I have updated most of the links on the site and added a few new sites including Be Brave and Prey's Lair.  Sorry for not doing this sooner, I was on vacation.

• Infinite MHz

Remember the 50MB movie of the interview with Paul Schuytema?   Infinite MHz, the TV show that did the last interview is planning on another this year at E3.  Expect another internet version of the interview after E3.

• New Prey Tribe

DA MightY BravE is a new Prey Tribe that has started by StreberN.   This is the second known Prey Tribe. The last one was created last year.  And news on the word "tribe,"  Paul Schuytema seemed to confirm that in his .plan update saying that Prey has tribes, not clans.

• Prey Sculpture

John Anderson's (Prey mapper) father has created a sculpture reproducing the Prey Logo. Here is a short description of how it was put together:

"The Prey logo sculptures were created by Chuck Anderson of Petaluma California. The cost for materials was $200 to create 2 identical pieces and required a month of planning and work. The finished piece is 24 inches wide, 28 inches tall and weighs approximately 20 pounds. The talon was created by welding together wire rods to create a wire frame (very similar to creating a wire frame model in a computer). It was then covered with a plaster bandage type of material then a softer wall putty was applied. This was sanded and sculpted into the desired shape and details where added. After 20 plus coats of paint the talon was complete."

• Prey Development Update

A new development update talking about Skinner, Prey Music, and misc stuff.

This is one of those rare Mondays that just crackles with excitement-a lot will be converging together this week, on both the tech and the content side of things. It's either that of the four cups of coffee that have my heart beating this morning.

Last week, Loyal gave us our first taste of the new Skinner. Loyal has been spending quite a lot of time converting his hybrid MFC program to a pure PreyOS tool. Now, our artists can texture the characters right in any game environment they'd like, and actually see the game's dynamic lights effect the character as they work. We're really working towards a WYSIWYG paradigm with our tools, and its coming together quite nicely.

After much discussion, we rearranged the desks in the main Prey "pit"-now, virtually all of the content creators are facing west, in line with the spinning of the Earth. We're hoping that this will cut down on their "developer vertigo."

John's father, when he had some time on his hands a few months back, emailed me and asked if he could reproduce our Prey logo for John. I said sure, but I had no idea what he was up to. Last week, John brought in the masterpiece-a gigantic sculpture of our logo, done in welded steel, wood and plaster. Very cool indeed. I'm going to try to talk John's dad into doing another one for our office.

Last week, Ken Brown, executive editor of Computer Gaming World, stopped in for a visit. He was in town on another story (covering a non-action game from the Dallas area... imagine that?), and just stopped by for an off-the-record visit. I showed him Preditor in action, and I think he liked what he saw.

I just got off the phone with Sascha of KMFDM. He and Tim Skold will be burning a CD and a DAT tape for us tonight. A few weeks ago, they sent us their first CD, which explored some rough ideas for the Prey theme. Even though the music is still in the rough state, I'm pretty excited about the kick-ass tunes and level-play music we'll have for Prey.