The game just hit an important milestone: our writer/designer Robin D. Laws has completed his work. All of the interactive scenes and myths are written.
This doesn’t mean the game is almost done. If I recall correctly, Robin also finished his work on King of Dragon Pass well before anyone else. But it does shift gameplay development into a refinement phase.
Other aspects of the game have only barely started, such as music and a tutorial. And there’s still a lot of art to draw.
And it’s possible we’ll need a few new scenes, though someone else will likely write them.
A very approximate guess as to how much Robin has written is 400,000 words. (The scene compiler outputs a text file with all the strings, which we will be spell checking. This file contains 402,293 words, though some of these are names of music or other aspects of implementation.) That’s as much as ten short novels!
While you’re waiting to read Robin’s work in Six Ages, you can check out some of his other recent work, which has been nominated for ENnies Awards.
Awesome can’t wait for the game to come out…just one question is it coming to PC?
Not making promises for any platform yet.
Awesome! Is the writing close to King of Dragon Pass’ scale of text or even more?
As a finished and updated game, King of Dragon Pass has more words of text, though I think that my count there includes advice and other non-scene text. The games aren’t trying to do quite the same thing, but both do contain multiple novels in pure size.
Makes sense that KoDP, with all its updates over the decades, would have more raw volume
But I’m intrigued by your last line! Can you elaborate on the differences in the games’ “mission statements”? All this talk of a spiritual successor sounded like it would be another awesome event-story-life-sim!
Not yet, but the goal is not to unify the tribes and become King of Dragon Pass. So there won’t be all the tribal negotiation scenes.
There will still be interactive events tied together in part by the economics system.
Ahh so you mean gameplay differences more than genre/style?
Yes.
Could you possibly make easy difficultly an option? I love the ability to play games like this very casually.
FWIW, King of Dragon Pass had levels of difficulty. Robin and I did come up with some things that should make this game easier to play, regardless of story challenge.