Status Update #2
Hello again everyone! Its looking like this update will actually be coming on Friday. Again apologize for the unexpected delay, my goal is to get through this shaky period and hopefully we won't have interruptions like this in the future.
Just to give a brief explanation as to whats taking so long. Pretty much from the beginning of the whole Rogue Fable series of projects I've been able to make progress on the games in a sort of ad-hoc manner.
Until now, I've managed to make decent progress by just focusing on details and short term improvements with only the most general plan as to how everything is going to work together in the final game.
This lack of longer term planning is apparent in both the design of the systems and content in the game and also in the underlying code and tools I use for development.
About two months ago (when this sort of experimental period began) I sort of realized that this was no longer going to work since the game had reached a level of both complexity and size that would require a bit more planning and conscious design.
So the last few months have really just been a wild adventure of really taking stock of everything I've built so far, the direction I'd like the game to go, and coming up with some sort of plan and schedule of how to get there. Since this is by far the largest project I've ever worked on, I'm pretty much learning as I go which makes it difficult to estimate how long things are going to take.
So over the past few months I've been spending a ton of time really taking the time to analyze the game in its current state, identify the problems and issues I have with it, trying to define what sort of long term vision I'd like to achieve, and trying to figure out how to move between these two states.
I've been going over literally every aspect or system in the game, most of which have just sort of accumulated over time, and really taken the time to figure out how I'd like them to work. In many cases (such as opening up the structure of the world), the changes I'd like to make are quite drastic and will hopefully lead to pretty massive improvements.
Doing this has involved not only a ton of design work, but also lots of experiments, on the dev-branch, which have left it a complete mess full of dead ends and abandoned or altered ideas.
I believe this experimental phase was critical at this point in the project, since I now have a much clearer idea of the final vision of the project, and many of these ideas are now present in some embryonic form on the dev-branch.
The current delays are just me fighting with this giant mess, trying to strip out all the bits that are not working while polishing and debugging the bits that are in order to get the game back to a playable state.
If everything goes according to plan, I think I can get this mostly done by Friday with the merge back with the main branch coming a week or two after that, and then its back to normal development, now armed with all the knowledge and experience gained from this phase.
Just as a warning I should point out that my current plan is actually to strip back the dev branch as much as possible, basically bringing it much closer to the 1.26 version, though with some massive changes, improvements, additions and re balancing.
Basically, I'm thinking of these last few months as a bunch of experiments and prototypes that helped locked down the long term vision of the game and expose all the stuff that will need to be implemented to get there. Due to the mess, dead ends and false starts, I'll be stripping back a ton of stuff to get us back to a point of relative stability (1.26). From there, I hope to be able to use the prototypes and experiments as a guide in order to gradually grow the game into its final form.
So yeah, to bring this long rambling explanation to a close:
Thank you everyone, for all your support and encouragement. Its been a tough few months but I think we're nearly past it. Update to the dev branch should be coming this Friday (July 05) with the update to the main branch coming a week later.
Just to give a brief explanation as to whats taking so long. Pretty much from the beginning of the whole Rogue Fable series of projects I've been able to make progress on the games in a sort of ad-hoc manner.
Until now, I've managed to make decent progress by just focusing on details and short term improvements with only the most general plan as to how everything is going to work together in the final game.
This lack of longer term planning is apparent in both the design of the systems and content in the game and also in the underlying code and tools I use for development.
About two months ago (when this sort of experimental period began) I sort of realized that this was no longer going to work since the game had reached a level of both complexity and size that would require a bit more planning and conscious design.
So the last few months have really just been a wild adventure of really taking stock of everything I've built so far, the direction I'd like the game to go, and coming up with some sort of plan and schedule of how to get there. Since this is by far the largest project I've ever worked on, I'm pretty much learning as I go which makes it difficult to estimate how long things are going to take.
So over the past few months I've been spending a ton of time really taking the time to analyze the game in its current state, identify the problems and issues I have with it, trying to define what sort of long term vision I'd like to achieve, and trying to figure out how to move between these two states.
I've been going over literally every aspect or system in the game, most of which have just sort of accumulated over time, and really taken the time to figure out how I'd like them to work. In many cases (such as opening up the structure of the world), the changes I'd like to make are quite drastic and will hopefully lead to pretty massive improvements.
Doing this has involved not only a ton of design work, but also lots of experiments, on the dev-branch, which have left it a complete mess full of dead ends and abandoned or altered ideas.
I believe this experimental phase was critical at this point in the project, since I now have a much clearer idea of the final vision of the project, and many of these ideas are now present in some embryonic form on the dev-branch.
The current delays are just me fighting with this giant mess, trying to strip out all the bits that are not working while polishing and debugging the bits that are in order to get the game back to a playable state.
If everything goes according to plan, I think I can get this mostly done by Friday with the merge back with the main branch coming a week or two after that, and then its back to normal development, now armed with all the knowledge and experience gained from this phase.
Just as a warning I should point out that my current plan is actually to strip back the dev branch as much as possible, basically bringing it much closer to the 1.26 version, though with some massive changes, improvements, additions and re balancing.
Basically, I'm thinking of these last few months as a bunch of experiments and prototypes that helped locked down the long term vision of the game and expose all the stuff that will need to be implemented to get there. Due to the mess, dead ends and false starts, I'll be stripping back a ton of stuff to get us back to a point of relative stability (1.26). From there, I hope to be able to use the prototypes and experiments as a guide in order to gradually grow the game into its final form.
So yeah, to bring this long rambling explanation to a close:
Thank you everyone, for all your support and encouragement. Its been a tough few months but I think we're nearly past it. Update to the dev branch should be coming this Friday (July 05) with the update to the main branch coming a week later.