This is our second “State of Development” post. We’ll be going through what we’ve accomplished since our first state of development post and what’s still missing.
Update on Us
We still all have full time jobs outside of this project, still remotely meeting up a few nights each week to get some game dev work in, and still only putting out private alpha builds. We have added an occasional weekend remote meeting to drink and plan some of the missing game events/content. At this point, we’ve only had one, but we managed to plan the opening events for the start of the game.
Some updated stats:
Android Alpha builds: 153
Commits: 6056
Drinks: 686 (started tracking this very late)
World and Generation
We’re in the tweak and polish phase with our world generation systems. Most recent changes have been to increase biome diversity and enhance our decoration restriction system. A lot of “it would be cool to do X”, and then figuring out the right system changes needed to make it happen.
The first pass of the first 3 biomes is done: Prison, Sewers, and Caves. The 4th biome, Fire, also has significant progress made.
Characters
Configured versions of all npcs from the design docs are in. For the most part, only minor changes had to be made from our initial plans. More play testing and balancing may result in some npcs being moved around between biomes, but it’s in a good place at this point.
Items and Equipment
We still have a ton of ideas for new items. Lately, there’s been more polish of existing items and behavior though instead of adding new things.
Weapon and Armor enchantments were added recently, but there are still as many tickets describing new enchantments to add as there are existing configured enchantments.
Bosses and Events
Still at the same place with bosses: 5 existing boss fights of the 7 planned. Still planning an over the top end game boss fight.
The starting-a-new-game opening event ended up being some of the most complicated event config we’ve done to this point. It also turned out pretty awesome. However, it makes some of our existing boss events not look as great in comparison.
There’s a good chance we’ll end up doing a review and polish pass on all the existing bosses. At the same time, we’ll be sure to apply what we’ve learned to make that final boss event stand out from all the others.
Art - Seriously… Still...
We’re still running placeholders with a mixture of various purchased art pack content thrown in… Things definitely look prettier than they originally did, but… still have a way to go on this one.
Music / SFX
We finally have a full list of all needed sound effects with placeholder config in place to tie everything together as new sounds are added. Just working through the missing items at this point.
Controls / User Interface
Our UI was at a decent spot during the last post. We’re still somewhat plagued by trying to get a clean equip/unequip/compare menu that doesn’t overwhelm new players. We have made a fair amount of fixes and changes to work towards this.
Still have a few more ideas planned, but not yet implemented. Rough edges are slowly getting smoother.
Wrap Up and Dodge a Solid Release Date
At this point, system development is nearly complete and we’re firmly in the configure, play test, polish, and repeat loop.
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed hearing about our progress and you’re as excited for release as we are.
Love Always,
Much Software
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