Shards of Eradine Dev Update (Patreon)

Apologies for the radio silence of late, between a week of having some external help in the office in the shape of my father and a Headphones week of development to boot, I needed to get the above codefest finished before I can update our charts and metrics to work out exactly how long is left in terms of raw development hours as about 10 days ago it looked like we might never be finished.

I'll explain that one immediately before people start to panic!

So, we took a much needed step back 2 weeks ago and between the team spent a good 4 or 5 days doing a full system review and came up with the mother of all tasklists of done, in progress and todo tasks and in all honesty, it scared the shit out of me after it was done.

The problem with the above was there is no sense of scale on that ToDo pile and at this stage its inclusive of a lot of 80%+ tasks too. But yeah, at first glance I'm freaking the funk out thinking how the hell are we only 35% Done too...

So we then needed to assign metrics against whats in that list for estimates on timescales and its looking more like this:

It's still pretty bad considering how hard we've been pushing to get to release now for nearly 4 months solid now but as a Starter for 10 we had something to work towards.

There are some obvious quick wins and still slight fallacies in the outstanding tasks; 

• We have 103 locations in the game so each location is allocated 15 minutes for General Setup, and at this stage 90%+ are done.
• Spawn and Destination points both are set at 15 minutes and total 201 of the ToDo tasks but again, are largely complete.
• Chest Locations, NPCs, Music and SFX add another 225 tasks at ToDo, all allocated 15 minutes for final checks but again, largely complete

And so on for the most part the task list is still a very worst case scenario and halving the outstanding days gave us what felt like a more accurate figure for sure. 

But even down at 40-50 days dev, we still had two huge tasks that made up 400 hours that have been proving the most time-consuming between James and myself which are Cutscenes and Interactive Cutscenes.

The setup on both is still arduous, especially with the interactive style ones where our NPCs move about, animate etc and our longest cutscene in the game still had at least 2 days work on it. We had two choices if we wanted to bring the deadline in - outsource the cutscenes or build a tool and revise the plan.

Given the difficulty we had with outsourcing colliders, which was arguably a simple task, it would likely have taken as much time to train some freelancers as it would to just plough on so we chose the latter and I took the task on myself to revise the visual novel engine, source all the required artwork for the NPCs in this style and try and bring our estimate down.

The results, Im pleased to say are thus:

Meet Henriq! One of 57 unique characters that have dialogue in 158 cutscenes from the game that are now all fully working with the new style, took me around 25 hours of development and has thus reduced the estimated number of days down to around 20 between James and myself.

Today thus far I've finished off the Replay Gallery which allows the player to flick through their unlocked scenes, or play the entire story from the start to the finish in one sitting. I've also created a test harness for the scene triggers too, which I can confirm is working and about to get integrated with the maps.

This should in theory give us an end to end build, at long bloody last, by the end of this week and allow us to focus on polish whilst we get full game testing underway starting next week.

Soooo... I dont want to give an actual date, as we all frigging know I 100% suck at that, but what I can say is SoE is damn close to being ready, and no-one is more relieved than me to finally see the finishing line on V1.0!

Last but not least, a revised estimate looks like this for dev members only:

One piece of bad news is however, the fishing minigame has been cut for V1.0 until it can bee finished off but its a relatively small price to pay to finally hit release! :)