The Tomorrow Children is speeding towards its alpha test and Director Dylan Cuthbert is still distributing information on the game's tech and gameplay across NeoGAF and Twitter.

Here's a recap of what he revealed:

• As far as Dylan knows, this is the first game that has indirect lighting bounce three times off surfaces in real-time. Lighting is entirely dynamic.
• The game has a "pretty good" anti-aliasing, even if it's hard to see in a 720p stream with compression artifacts.
• The developer expects some people to "grief" initially, even if "griefing" in the game isn't that bad anywway, but soon they'll realize that they have to "live" with 50-100 other players in the town and people willl start recogniozing them. The game isn't about having random one-off encounters, it's about you working together with other people you'll get to know.
• You can go to other towns, but those are where your friends are, so you're less likely to grief them in the first place. You can also move towns entirely, but that requires filling a lot of "paperwork" or bribing an official.
• There's a way to report players and those that get reported too many times, they will be deported to a town with others like them. If one gets downvoted too many times his silouhette will turn black and he will be hunted by the police.
• You can actually make it your "job" to hunt down griefers, and there will be tools in the game to help you in that cause, like "wanted" posters and trackers.
• The game has been designed around the concept of being always online, but it doesn't "feel" like a multiplayer game.
• Players "poofing" in and out of view when they do an action is part of the fundamental structure of the game.
• The special effect for this "poofing" is going to be improved, but the fun of the game revolves exactly on not knowing where exactly other players are until they do something. Players should get used to it quickly and use it at their own advantage.
• Missile and Kaiju effects will be improved by the game's release too.
• There are no plans for split screen for now, and it'd cost in overall visual impact as well.

Personally, The Tomorrow Children has jumped right to the top of my "most wanted" games. Many of its aspects seem very close to a dangerous social experiment, and I'm definitely a sucker for those. Time will tell if its parody of a Marxist society will also manage to prove fun to play.