Did you know SVO has a Facebook page? You can find it at 
http://www.facebook.com/earthboundonline

We started posting sneak peaks over at our Facebook page, asking for your input, so if you would like to see the new stuff we're working on head over there and give us a like (that makes us feel good about ourselves). As an added bonus, every week one person will be randomly chosen and granted a custom sprite for the New Morel world of the game.

Hey all!

 

We hope 2013 started of well for you guys. We have some good news, just a little over a week ago we had just one programmer, that sea kraken known as Darkfrost. However, a friend of his from university joined and will be helping out as well!

 

But that's not all, a few days later a software developer from Florida asked if he could help as well and he's done a bunch of things already. With three programmers things should really be getting up to speed in no time with, hopefully, a release not too far away.

 

What's that you ask? Even MORE good news? Yep, since SVO is the largest game built with Netgore the engine's creator offered his help to make SVO somewhat popular so the engine has a nice "example game". So that's going from one to four programmers in less than two weeks.

 

However, we all know our experience with programmers hasn't been too great over the last few years with people disappearing without doing a single thing they promised. But luckily Darkfrost and Skye have known Spodi for five years now and he wont' be going anywhere, let's hope the other two guys stick around as well, then we can really get some Earthbound goodness done!

Happy holidays from the entire SVO crew! Hopefully one of your presents contained a hamburger an Earthbound cartridge, if not, no worries. There's always the EB world in SVO to play in ;)

All areas up to Dusty Dunes Desert are finished! In the next update the Earthbound world will be doubled in size with plenty of areas to revisit and memories to relive. We're working hard on getting the New Morel world up and running with a handful of maps as well!

 

Some stats:

# of music ingame: 50
# of maps : 126

# of graphics: 7006

# of NPCs: 473 (300 unique)

# of created characters: 3420

# of ingame shops: 62

# of (Enemy) attacks: 294 (not all implemented yet)

# of items: 50

 

Keep track of the progress in the Changelog Progress Thread on the forum (make sure to go to the last page in the thread). Remember, if you want just to visit the forum you can also go to http://forum.skyon.be, which loads faster since it's not embedded into the site.

 

Also notice the "Powered by NetGore" button on the left, it's the mmorpg engine we're using. It's currently being improved to appeal more to the unexperienced wanna-be ORPG designers. It works together flawlessly with the graphics packages we've released in the downloads section. If you want to make your own Earthbound-themed MMORPG be sure to check out the Netgore website.

 

Last but not least, we'd like to welcome Worship and SleepyTimeJesse to the permanent SVO crew (check out the Team Skyon tab)!