Since I'll be leaving for a one-week business trip tomorrow (after which I will have another two weeks of hellish crunch) I thought I might as well give you a little update.
So what have I been doing? Mostly exactly what I'll be doing for the next three weeks, which is working on dayjob-related stuff that nobody cares about. Anyway, I still managed to sneak in a couple of game development hours here and there, so - even if that doesn't mean much anymore - that alpha is coming along and hadn't I been slapped with another deadline last month it would probably be deployed right now.
Either way, let's go through it:
Level Design - done. There are a couple rooms without much going on in them, but I'm currently polishing that. I generally try keeping "storage rooms" at a minimum (unless they are secrets) by introducing something interesting/special/challenging in most rooms - though it strongly depends on the area. Not much you can do with regular caves (unless they have some secondary theme going on - which I normally try using).
The first area is heavily interconnected with other areas. There is one "exit" in the alpha, but in the final version it will be connected to several further areas, that either loop back to a save spot in the alpha area or which can be entered from there.
Currently it's relatively hard to say, but size-wise the alpha map is roughly between a sixth and an eigth of the entire game. For comparison:
One separated area of King's Field 2 (JP) was around an 8th of the entire game's space. I'm keeping that as a close reference for scale, though it doesn't say much about the amount of content. Finishing this one area effectively took 3 to 4 months - I should however note, that much of it was optimization of the workflow. At the beginning I was still torn between modular level pieces and volume-based editing. For the next few areas I will probably have a much faster blockout phase since I think I found a good balance there.
Quest Design - mostly done. You can play the area from start to finish, combine all necessary items, do all necessary puzzles - there is also some optional side stuff going on. I still need one dialogue and one very small puzzle.
Encounter Design - pretty much done. I re-introduced stealth but I'm not sure whether I'll keep it for the alpha. It's essentially Thief's light-gem system. Still a bit janky but all in all it works. Enemies currently don't have their search state activated though, as they do not yet react to sound cues.
Menu - Functional, but ugly. Still gotta make some changes to save-on-quit. I also hooked up the main menu with the actual game and put in a little text intro.
Other stuff:
AI can now open doors. Also...
Documents now contain keywords for the dialogue system. I still have to switch to a newer unreal version to highlight them though.
(I still gotta go through all texts again)
Death system is currently similar to king's field 1. (start again at shrine / no repercussions atm).
I might have mentioned it before, but there are also elevators in the game. Seems like nothing special, but makes level design more interesting.
Music is still being discussed, but there is some good stuff going on there.
Sound design still needs work.
Oh yeah I'm also cutting down memory size and therefor loading times. That's something I did last week. In the end it will probably be a smart move to load everything directly at start up and do the rest via streaming. Though that means I gotta be a bit careful with save states.
And I believe that's it...
All in all, it might still take a while until I can fully focus on development again. I'll still try to get stuff done, but end of april will probably be really bad.
May should be good again. Hopefully this will be some of the last crunch I'll have to do under this contract. Anyway... some more WIP screenshots...
