Wow, it's been over a month since the last Dev Watch article. My apologies - this isn't a result of the lack of news on the BP front (well, save for one week), but of my own life taking me away and keeping me busy. I've barley been in a house to do this over the past few weeks. So, there is naturally much to report.

First off, Snowcrash tells us (somewhat dissapointingly) that KK will not be promoting BP at E3 this year. However, the costs of attending such an event make this perhaps unsuprising until a publisher iwwth a big PR budget would choose to pick up the bill. He does mention however the intention to attend the Games Convention (renamed GamesConn and moved to Cologne) this year. If nothing else, it's hard to imagine what their exucse for not making the 3 hour drive would be.

Next up we had Black Prophecy coverage in the "electronic magazine" MMOzine. The format wasn't popular with BP forum members, nor was anything new mentioned. MMOzine said to expect a highly atmospheric game - but then that's something KK have always nailed, despite the other faults of their games.

KK then decided that a few new screenshots were in order. More prettiness, more heavy use of effects visible on all. Perhaps of interest, ships looking the same as the "Ashara Drones" of the gameplay trailer are described by Snowcrash as belonging to the Restorers. Snowcrash also used this thread to discuss in some detail the difficulties of reaching a full agreement with a publisher over the various financial, practical and creative concerns involved in a game.

Clan and news site GameSNAFU got themselves an interview with Kirk Lenke. Perhaps as this was closer to a fansite than a mainstream news site, the discussion got into a lot more meat of the game than previous interviews we've read. Kirk reemphasised the idea that PvP is expected to dominate playtime "endgame" while the (again confirmed as "short") experience of getting there, while offering PvP opportunities along the way will be primarily PvE. We also discovered that despite the highly modular ship design, players still progress through 3 distinct ship classes in the process of levelling up. Light, Medium and Heavy fighters. The differences between these were not discussed and neither was the role of the playable Human shuttle. PvP and resource stations recieves a considerable bit of discussion, with KK saying that resources will influence respawn rates in faction and clan battles, as well as alluding to several different scales of combat - free for all, clan vs clan and faction vs faction. Perhaps most suprisingly from the whole interview, Kirk mentions the existence of "special tactics" that will temporarily take over control of the ship from direct joystick/mouse control. To speculate for a moment, my best guess is that these tactics will allow players to perfom moves impossible under the normal flight model, for example the often requested ability to invert the ship's direction.

In a really interesting development, Snowcrash sat down with Kirk and Seminus/Simon to put various questions collected from the forums over the past few weeks. The questions range from the pretinent - what KK want to see from a publisher and why the chase is so difficult - to the trivial - pirates or ninjas. The general focus of the interview is on the thoughts and background of the two interviewees rather than on game details, but it is interesting to see where the lead developers are coming at the game from. This thread is also enough to finally draw Kirk's forum account into activity, where he states that KK currently have 40 employees.

The 4th community update rounds up the other announcements mentioned above, as well as announcing the forthcoming interviews - with Warcry Network, Voodoo Extreme and Thirteen1. No news on the previously touted developer diaries - maybe the community Q&A is intend to fulfill this roll?

The more recent Black Prophecy Newsletter provides a much briefer look at all these issues again, but also contains a shout out to Dev Watch and the Prophecy Network as a whole. Woo, look at us go.

Whew, well that's all to round up for now. There shouldn't be anything as like as long a gap between articles in the future, although I may still miss at least one weekend in July. See you all next time.