Time flies! Between the holidays and cranking away at our task list, I just realized it’s been 2 months since our last update. Lots of progress has been made, so here’s where we are right now.
Working on my cannonball in the Gardens. As I described several months ago, the entire team was given a couple weeks to play through the full build and write up all of our comments, required features, bugs, etc. The agreement we had as a team is that we would synthesize all of that, discuss what’s really important, and put together our final task list out of that. No new features were to be added beyond that list. We went through that exercise back in August and have been working off of that list ever since. I’m happy to say we’re ticking tasks off of that list at a very steady pace, and we’ve been disciplined about not adding anything new. Just to recap the progress that’s been made, here’s a partial list of what we’ve completed since going through that exercise:

• Improved backtracking and world traversal system
• Implemented a system for players to upgrade their Spells
• Implemented auto-formatting text system for multi-lingual support
• Programmed and animated the final boss battle
• Animated all boss intros and deaths
• Animated custom deaths for most enemies
• Reworked and improved Minibosses
• Sound FX for all bosses (except the final) and half of the enemies
• Improved Visual FX
• Improved scripted scenes
• Polished the Map Screen and other UI elements
• Improved pacing by interspersing some “breather” rooms with less challenge and more resources, as well as balancing combat, platforming, and puzzle rooms throughout the game

There’s also a ton of other work - a lot of which took even longer to complete than those features listed here - that we got done in that time, but some of it just wouldn’t make sense as a feature in a list. Suffice it to say, those improvements make the game feel a lot tighter and encourage players to continue exploring the world.
The final background art for the Save Rooms. We’re now about 50% of the way through that final list. We have a date in mind that we think the game will be done and ready to ship, but I’m going to hold off on saying it here just in case my estimate isn’t accurate. Here are some of the remaining tasks:

• Replacing all remaining placeholder animations and background art
• Improving the enemy spawn system to make sure that every enemy type shows up in every game, as well as maintaining a healthy variety
• Sound FX for the enemies in the second half of game, the final boss, as well as environmental sounds
• Beefing up secondary quests
• More Items & Weapon system improvements
• Additional variation in environmental art & Landmarks
• Populate secrets in all areas
• Polish NPC dialog and sidequests
• Main Menu art
• Economy improvements
• Difficulty balancing (this will be one of the last things we do)

Again, there are some other tasks on our list that probably only make sense to us, so I’m leaving them off this list for now. Whereas we often felt like the more progress we made the further the finish line pulled away, we’re now seeing it get closer and closer. As we cross off each of these tasks as we complete them, the list keeps getting shorter. As always, thanks for your ongoing support and patience. We’re getting close and I’m hoping you’ll feel that the wait has been worth it!

[ 2018-02-07 04:44:53 CET ] [ Original post ]