As you all know, tomorrow we're opening the flood gates and launching Episode 3 of Forumwarz to the world.

I'm super proud of this Episode. It is by far our biggest update to date, and it concludes the story arc that we started out on years ago.

I want to take this last moment of silence before the storm to thank all the non-CZ people who contributed to this episode. I'm talking about all the writers who dreamt up the characters and missions, the artists who created new images, the people who recorded their voices for tubsonics and the testers who relentlessly helped to polish the whole thing.

It was a monumental effort and I think everyone who plays through the new content will appreciate it.

Launch Details

I'm going to take down the site at 9AM EST. As the regulars know, it often takes hours and hours to get things ready, so expect the game to launch sometime in the afternoon. While the site is down we'll set up a cool chat room to chill in and watch people doing nothing on their web cams.

-ET

I'm delighted to announce that Episode 3 of Forumwarz will be released on January 20th.

This is by far our biggest Episode yet, and the amount of work it's taken to get to this point is staggering. It would have never been possible without the hard work of dozens of people, so I'd like to extend my thanks to everyone who has helped getting us this far!

buildrs will be suspended

I've been thinking about it recently, and one of the hardest parts of pushing out a new episode is the merging of buildr content with the new episode's content. In order to make this easier, we're going to suspend the buildrs until we launch on the 20th. By doing this, I can merge the data in advance, and it should make the launching effort a lot easier. The benefit is that everyone will get to play the game earlier, we'll have less downtime and I should be less tired on launch day to fix any issues that may pop up!

I'm sure the inconvenience will be worth it!

See you on the 20th :)

-ET

I'm delighted to announce that yesterday we launched the beta of Episode 3. Don't be dissapointed if you didn't get an invite! We only had a limited amount of slots available and we filled them up quickly. We will be running a second beta round once the initial bugs are sorted out, and then we'll be launching the game in January!

Last year, pre-orders of Episode 2 were successful, so we've brought them back. For the measly price of 100 Brownie Points (about $10), you can snag a copy of Episode 3, as well as a Free E-Peen(tm)!. Note: that all characters attached to your account will get the peen, so it's a good way to bump up your penile length in one fell swoop.

Pre-Order Forumwarz Episode 3 on the Buy Stuff Page.

Want more Episode 3 news?

You might want to check out the Episode 3 Minor Spoilers thread on Flamebate. I've been updating it about once a day and will continue to do so as long as I can think of minor spoilery fun :)

It's been a while since we released the Episode 3 podcast and our users have resorted to threats of ransom for updates!

As you can imagine, a lot of progress has been made towards finishing Episode 3. I am looking at my Episode 3 flowchart right now and far more is crossed off than isn't, and every day I cross off some more. Right now the majority of the development is in my hands, as all the conversations/items/forums have been built for some time.

A couple of weeks ago during our meeting, I told Jalapeno and BingeBot 2015 that if I worked my ass off, I could have a beta out quickly. But we all decided it was in everyone's best interests to take our time with it and not rush it out. We want Episode 3 to be as awesome as possible, and if that means launching a little later so be it.

I'm still not sure how long Episode 3 will take to play through (we'll need beta testing for that), but content wise it's pretty enormous. I think in most metrics, Episode 3 is bigger. I found out this morning that there are more sTalk conversations in Episode 3 than in Episodes 1 and 2 combined!

So please be patient with us. The worst of the wait is over, and it's just a matter of time before we're ready to open our beta testing and announce a release date.

-ET and the crew

Hey everyone,

As threatened in our last post, here's the podcast for your listening pleasure:

The Episode 3 Development Podcast

We did our best to cut it down to size, but it's still an earful. We hope you find it an interesting and informative masturbatory aide.

Thanks for listening!

So the great news is the gameplay upgrade launched quite smoothly. We also made some major server software upgrades and the site is running much faster for it. For the geeks reading this: we upgraded to Ruby 1.9.1, which is quite a big change from Ruby 1.8.6. It's over 3x as fast in most of our benchmarks!

Following the gameplay tune-up, I have turned my focus to Episode 3. While I haven't been working on Episode 3 full time until recently, Jalapeno Bootyhole and his talented apprentices have been churning out content for months. There is a lot done, and I will end up spending most of my time integrating it.

We have a much better idea of what shape Episode 3 is taking and can now answer a lot more of the questions we've been putting off since Episode 2 launched. It seems like a great time to do another Podcast, so we'd like to invite anyone interested to post their questions in this thread on Flamebate

Finally, a public service announcement: We have been updating the blog far less frequently since we started using Twitter. A lot of our announcements are better suited to short sentences than long posts. If you are looking for Forumwarz news you should watch us there, too. You can find a link on the right hand side of this blog.