Retrospective – Six Ages Development Blog

Year In Review: 2022

Lights Going Out

Obviously, we didn’t meet our goal of completing the game this year.

Chart showing scenes coded and scenes fully tested

We are a lot closer. The “exhaustive scene testing” chart isn’t a complete picture, but it’s one way to visualize the progress. For what it’s worth, there are about 36% more scenes than “Ride Like the Wind” (which is one reason it’s taking so long to wrap up).

We’ve also been testing the balance of different victory benefits for games continued from the first chapter, and tracking emergent behavior from different play styles. Is it possible to win without anyone starving? Does clan mood go into an irrevocable dive? Can you quash the local impact of Chaos? Can you still win at Harsh difficulty? The game tracks a number of values, and I graph these so I can spot unusual changes. If there’s a big change, I can check the logs to see what caused it.

A less tangible factor is how the game feels. Testing isn’t really the same as playing, but I think we’ve identified a few places where we needed to create more stories. (That’s the rightmost green circle in the chart.)

The first game was set in the Storm Age. This one takes place in the Chaos Age (or Great Darkness). Our plan was always to adjust the user interface to reflect the difference. Our publisher’s art director, Xin Ran Liu, gave us new assets that reflect your clan’s rise to glory (buttons are now metal) and the decay of the period (buttons are cracked or suffer from tin pest).

The music also needs to reflect the differences, as well as different story themes. We’ve made some good progress.

Our development process is dependent on iOS (for build automation, bug reporting, and unit testing), but late this year we made sure that the game still builds for Windows and macOS, and has the necessary UI changes. I often seemed to be fighting the development tools (breakpoints have been my nemesis with Unity since 2012) and various compatibility issues. But on the plus side, my tools do seem to be working better with Windows. The desktop builds are basically ready to start testing.

Since we have the game running at 16:9 with a cursor, we can make a game play trailer, which we need to create a Steam page. (I expect Kitfox Games will be setting that up next month.) I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of what OBS can do, but it does let me capture video of just the content area of the game window.

There’s still artwork, music, and testing to complete, but things look much closer than they did a year ago.

Ride Like the Wind

Clan screen on iPad mini (6th generation)

Our focus was on finishing “Lights Going Out,” but since the code base is the same, we released an update to the App Store to deal with the latest iPad mini. Unlike desktop, which has fewer screen shapes and typically letterboxes, the iPad and iPhone builds use every available pixel. The original design was back when all iPads were at least 768 points high, and things like the side menu needed a little tweaking for the 744 point mini.

World Events

COVID continues to be an issue. Our summer intern caught it and wasn’t able to do as much testing as we’d hoped. Please wear an N-95 mask when you’re out in public!

Russia’s attack on Ukraine hasn’t had a direct impact on our team, and so far HeroCraft (which is based in Russia) has been able to keep publishing King of Dragon Pass for us.

Thanks to Elon Musk’s mismanagement of Twitter, we’re now also posting on Mastodon at mastodon.gamedev.place/@asharp.

What Next?

The Six Ages games have taken a lot longer than I expected to create. In 2023, I may be able to start something shorter.

Year In Review: 2021

RIP Stan LePard

Unfortunately, Stan LePard, who composed the music for Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind and King of Dragon Pass, passed on unexpectedly in February. Stan was great to work with and created some wonderful music for the games.

I just learned that there’s a GDC scholarship in honor of Stan.

Lights Going Out

The team has been pushing to complete the second Six Ages game. Obviously, we didn’t get there in 2021.

But Robin Laws did finish writing the interactive events, including a second batch suggested by QA. There’s still a chance we’ll need a few more, but this means that the design focus is now tuning, not creating.

Since the writing is done, we know pretty much all the art the game needs, and are now working in a variety of styles (depending on what’s being illustrated).

We’ve been testing the game all along (an advantage of creating a sequel that can use the same core code), and that’s been accelerating this year. As before, it’s a mix of making sure each response of each scene works, making sure the game works from start to finish, and making sure that the game is challenging and fun. QA also verifies bug fixes to make sure they actually fix things, and don’t introduce other problems. (The past couple weeks have had some good examples of why that’s important…)

Ride Like the Wind

While our focus has been the second game, we have been fixing some bugs in the original. There were also some issues that only affected iPad or iPhone, so we ended up taking some time and making an App Store update.

The Future

We’re not going to ship a game before it’s really done, but I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to release “Lights Going Out” next year.

And maybe start a new game.

Year In Review: 2020

TL;DR: We’re still making games.

COVID-19

The global pandemic hit all of us. Fortunately none of the team fell ill, though family members did, and there were several exposure or symptom scares. And while the team is distributed and work from home, that’s not the same thing in the middle of a pandemic, and when can’t really go anywhere else.

And of course we weren’t able to have occasional face-to-face meetings at conventions — or see fans.

Lights Going Out

We’ve been working on the next Six Ages game. “Lights Going Out” will let you continue the story of the clan you guided in “Ride Like the Wind” (though you can start a new one from scratch). Perhaps 3/4 of the events have been written and coded (with games like these, it’s hard to know exactly how many there will be, since we often add more towards the end, to fill in missing bits). And about half have been exhaustively tested. This is far enough that it’s now possible to play a significant chunk of the game without running into missing parts. Well, that’s what I tell myself, and then QA files bugs about missing parts.

The exact art requirements are similarly hard to know in advance (since those new scenes may require new art). But I think well over half of the scene art is complete.

We just started thinking seriously about the endgame — what constitutes “victory” in a story game. Polishing and coding this is on the schedule for January.

There’s still too much uncertainty to talk about a release schedule, unfortunately. But it’s now far enough that we can start thinking about tuning, and testing the game as a whole instead of just in pieces.

Ride Like the Wind

Although most of the development effort has been on the new game, they share the same game system, and some “Lights Going Out” bugs are common. And we’ve been fixing bugs as players report them.

Luckily, there haven’t been too many of those, so I’ve held off on making a lot of updates. Plus, just making a release takes resources, and QA has been less available thanks to COVID-19. But I do expect a bug fix release next year.

Future

Last year, I mentioned prototyping a new game. A combination of events led to a digital prototype. There might well be a game there, but it’s still a side project to have in reserve.

Year In Review: 2019

TL;DR: We released Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind for PC!

GDC

In March, I gave a talk about the design of Six Ages (and King of Dragon Pass) and how they work behind the scenes. This should be available in the GDC Vault.

PAX

We made a special demo version of the game to show at PAX West. (This gives a super-limited introduction and ends after one year.) Kitfox had a computer in their booth dedicated to this. It was great to see people actually playing the game, and meet one of the artists in person for the first time.

Update

While the game was being ported to PC, we were fixing bugs discovered by our iOS players. Originally we had hoped to make a single release, but rather than delay things, we released 1.0.8 to the App Store.

Lights Going Out

We had begun work on the second chapter, Six Ages: Lights Going Out, last year. It’s always hard to know exactly how many interactive scenes a game will need, since it isn’t until you play for a while that you know what’s missing. But assuming chapter 2 is about as complex as chapter 1, we’re about halfway through scene writing and coding. And the scene-specific QA is about 30% complete.

We don’t have any release information yet.

Port

Our goal was to release Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind for Windows and macOS in 2019. What that really meant was by mid-October, since indie games can’t launch whenever they feel like it and expect to get any attention. We needed to avoid as many similar game releases as possible, and beat the Christmas release cycle. (If we had slipped into November, we probably would have had to hold the game until 2020.)

It was a bigger project than we had expected, but Rusto came through and we did in fact release on 17 October.

Having a game on Steam has been a bit of a learning experience, since I tend not to buy my games there. I was surprised that you can buy a game you cannot actually launch. (We’re sorry that the game requires Windows 10, but there isn’t anything we can do about it.) GOG was different yet again. It was nice to have a publisher deal with many of the details.

I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get a lot of reviews, though perhaps we had done too well getting coverage of the iOS version, and it was hard for game sites to justify a second review. Plus, there really was no great release week — we came out at the same time as Disco Elysium, for example. Still, I was pretty pleased to see the Rock Paper Shotgun review.

And, we have been nominated for a few awards.

The port also gave us a way to sell Stan LePard’s soundtrack, which we had gotten requests for since the iOS release.

Future

I have no idea if the Indiepocalypse is real (since Six Ages was my first PC release), but it does seem like the publishing world is different than a year ago, and definitely since we re-released King of Dragon Pass. Although we are busy with the second Six Ages game, I think it’s a good idea to think about what might come after.

I have been making notes and trying things out. The prototype shown here won’t be the next game, since it felt boring. But maybe I will have something to share next year.

New Year’s Eve

This year, we finished “Ride Like the Wind” and released it to the App Store. It’s gotten pretty good reviews, including making it onto at least three “best of the year” lists (Gamasutra, TouchArcade, Pocket Tactics). And players helped us find bugs, so we released 6 updates (also adding more leader portraits and treasures, and the possibility of becoming known as a weasel).

Screen shot from Unity editor, showing face assets The story of bringing the game to other platforms wasn’t as happy, though at least our first programmer did not perish from life-threatening medical issues. Our new developer has been making good progress, and we are still on track to release in 2019 (as we originally hoped). Although the game will be available elsewhere too, it helps visibility if you wish-list it on Steam.

Our publishing partner, Kitfox Games, has set up a Discord channel where you can discuss the game. Other online resources include a wiki, a subreddit, and a “let’s play”.

I spoke about Six Ages (and King of Dragon Pass) at NGS2018.

And we began working on the second game, “Lights Going Out.” This will tell an entirely different story, continuing the saga of your clan generations later. Since the basic game system has been implemented, it’s already possible to get through a few game years. We’ve got 63 interactive scenes working (and partially tested), and 17 story illustrations completed.

Making Six Ages for iOS: A Retrospective

Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind was an attempt to recreate the magic of King of Dragon Pass, both from a game play sense, and from the personal viewpoint of a creator making something special with a great team. King of Dragon Pass managed to keep some people playing for nearly two decades. Making it was for me an amazing collaboration.

The game is a peculiar combination of narrative and turn-based strategy, drawing on the rich background of Greg Stafford’s Glorantha. The story is driven by making narrative choices, and held together by a politico-economic model that provides context and meaning to those decisions. And your strategic decisions can result in new narratives.

The scope of the game is also unusual, in that you’re in charge of a small clan whose story unfolds over several generations. Individual characters advise you and execute your decisions, but they may die of old age before the game is over.

This post originally appeared on Gamasutra.

Here’s a postmortem of the development process.

What Went Right

Improving the Formula

Why tamper with what works? Over its long life, King of Dragon Pass has sold nearly 200K copies. So Six Ages is a similar game. But we tried to improve the weaker areas and double down on the strong points.

I’d already simplified KoDP a bit for its 2.0 reboot, but there were still fiddly bits like precisely allocating land use, worrying about exact labor allocation, and counting individual beans, er, Bushels of food. A new system of Ventures, or special tasks, lets you clear fields or pastures without worrying about the numbers. This mechanic handles a wide variety of economic chores, giving the player a lot of control over how to allocate the clan’s labor. And we now assume your clan knows how to feed itself, and you only worry about having a sufficient reserve to make it to the next harvest.

Hyalor rides Gamari, who tries to buck him Heroquests—reenactments of myths on the Other Side—are a unique feature of the setting. They are intentionally unpredictable, to be true to Greg Stafford’s writings. This often frustrated KoDP players. In Six Ages we made several changes in the ritual visits to the Otherworld, in particular providing an in-game explanation of what went wrong (for example, “She said she should not have expected Yamsur to help. All the stories suggested he wouldn’t.”). We also do something similar for failure in more mundane situations (“<testee> said Nyalda might have heard our pleas if we’d devoted more ritual time to pasture magic at Sacred Time.”).

Your advisors have personalities, and we added new quirks (e.g. the Song Quoter and Xenophobe), and made sure that your clan council would sometimes talk to or about each other (since that was one of my favorite bits of KoDP). They may also initiate actions to further their own agendas.

Under the hood, we rationalized how success chances were calculated, and came up with a flexible system of concerns, which are essentially ongoing modifiers to a leader’s odds of success or the economic model. This made emergent properties easier for the designers to understand, and helped explain things to players.

Glorantha

Part of the formula was the mythic setting, Glorantha. We went all in on exploiting Glorantha’s rich background, setting the game in what KoDP regards as the age of mythology.

Map of Glorantha Even though the game was in a less documented time and place, we still had a lot of Gloranthan lore to draw from. We added new details as needed, expanding on material written since KoDP came out.

Greg Stafford, the creator of Glorantha, had retired and I didn’t really have the chance to work with him again. He did make some useful comments early in development. I was in close contact with Chaosium’s Creative Director, and we shared ideas and maps. You’ll find some of our art in Chaosium products.

Team

Once again I was able to work with extremely talented people. The Six Ages team was virtual, spread across many countries and time zones. I’ve never met most of them in person. But I didn’t need to limit my search for the best people to those I could meet with face-to-face, let alone share an office with. To stay in touch, I experimented with using Slack when we had a small group of concept artists. This turned out to work very well. (It certainly helps that so many people read and write English, even if it’s not their native language.) We didn’t end up with the same sort of cohesive team you can get when everyone is working in the same physical space but it still felt like a team. And once again, it felt to me like a great collaboration.

Being able to work with members of the original team also turned out to be a marketing point.

Testing Focus

To leverage a very small QA team, I made sure they were supported by tools. A debug dialog allows viewing raw values, running scripts, or setting up unusual situations. Many debug scripts do the same, and when QA wanted a new one, it was always top priority so they could keep going. For example, they might need to turn someone into a shaman, or make a neighboring chief a woman.

The scene compiler, which processes our custom scripting language, outputs a number of reports. They can be compared across builds, which made it easy to spot script typos. The compiler also output all text from the scripts. I’d periodically spell check this (which always made me come close to regretting that we’d included a personality quirk of inventing words).

Other typos could be caught by automated tests. I created unit tests which did crude sanity checking of every response of every scene. These could be tweaked to check certain problematic situations, like having no wealth or friends. I never got this fully automated, but the tests did keep a lot of bugs from even getting to QA.

Another tool was the ability to report issues directly from the game, on demand or after a crash. Reports include a detailed debug log which shows the scripts run, along with variable values. They also include two game saves (in case going back in time made it easier to reproduce a bug).

We didn’t add playtesters until relatively late. They had the same reporting feature, and I added a bunch of turn by turn economic data to reports, to help tune the game.

Refined User Experience

King of Dragon Pass came out when we didn’t have to worry about multiple screen sizes (both in its original 1999 release, and the 2011 iPhone edition). To handle phones as well as tablets and computers, we came up with a design that has two basic size classes. Each handles different screen sizes within the phone or tablet size class. (Tablets and computers have the same basic layout, though they’ll have other UI differences). This turned out to be very useful when Apple introduced an iPad with twice as much screen real estate as previous models. As much as possible, layouts within a screen are the same for both size classes. Small layout adjustments can be made by constants for finer-grained size categories.

Although your advisors mention exceptional circumstances, we also show them in a dashboard associated with the screen-switching menu. The economic concerns mentioned earlier are the most common, but promises, opportunities, and transient warnings also appear in the dashboard. This gives a quick summary, which advisors can give more information about.

KoDP’s tutorial was an attempt to show most parts of the game in one game year, but it tried to give the player as much freedom as possible and ended up very brittle. Rather than direct you through every management screen, tips now appear in context, so you can learn about a feature when you first encounter it. Playtesting revealed that this worked well if you were familiar with KoDP, but didn’t give you an overall sense of how to play. We added a very constrained tutorial at the last minute, which gives players an interactive introduction.

Like KoDP, Six Ages supports VoiceOver, so blind and low vision players can play on an even footing with sighted players. We redesigned how exploration worked to be task focused, rather than literally trying to duplicate the experience of choosing arbitrary spots on the map.

What Went Wrong

Schedule

I never made a very detailed estimate, but figured the game would take about 24 months. It ended up more like 46. By comparison, the original King of Dragon Pass took about 33.

Some of the slip was probably because I didn’t have any other programmers or producer (as I did with KoDP). And some of the freelancers couldn’t always work full time. But mostly it was a problem of not understanding the scope of the game. It was intended to be shorter than the long game in King of Dragon Pass.

The original plan was 275 interactive scenes. It ended up with 412. (KoDP had about 600.) Although we knew we could drop things like the tribal negotiation scenes in KoDP, we ended up needing even more scenes for the victory track than KoDP had.

We came in over budget as well, but only by about 23%. And that was still significantly less than the budget for KoDP.

The lengthy development period made it harder to generate buzz, since the release date was so far away.

We do hope that when we make the next game in the series, we won’t have to create all the infrastructure, and will have a better sense of what’s needed.

Cross-Platform

We’d hoped to be able to release the game on more platforms relatively quickly. Unfortunately, third-party libraries we’d hoped to be able to use were either discontinued by the time the game came out, or couldn’t be used with the latest development tools.

We’re currently working on a port, but it’s going to be much more expensive and time-consuming than we’d originally expected.

Team

The downside of working with freelancers is availability. Of course, an organization with employees can have turnover as well, but a couple team members left to further their careers, and several were constrained by other projects or caring for young children. In the end I don’t think this caused significant delays, but it was a constant worry.

UI

Even though the UI works well, one of our tradeoffs turned out to be problematic. Players often need to be aware of the current season. Although this was always shown on iPad, and easy to get to on iPhone, players weren’t always familiar with the Gloranthan seasons. In King of Dragon Pass, an illustration helped remind them. We eventually added a popup showing an illustration, but this wasn’t nearly as convenient. On the plus side, we managed to convey additional information (whether you were early or late in the season), and the dashboard probably was more important. Earlier playtesting might have caught this in time to rework the UI.

Another issue that surprised us: a few players complained that we’d made the text too small. It turned out that they had large devices, and because KoDP wasn’t designed to take advantage of them, iOS enlarged the screen. These players were unhappy with the extra screen real estate they got because Six Ages will show more text instead.

Story

It turns out that when winning the game depends on a plot twist, it’s really hard to tell players how to win the game. Many players aren’t sure what to do up to that point. And if they fail to win, they often have no clue why.

Not only that, but the overall game story is a bit of a surprise if you’ve played King of Dragon Pass.

These factors also made it harder to do buzz, since there was a lot I didn’t want to reveal too early. For example, we couldn’t do open development like many indie studios do, because in a story game, there isn’t much else to talk about other than the story. And much of the art could also be considered to spoil the story, or at least a big PR splash at launch.

Conclusion

Currently the game is out on the App Store, to very favorable player response (4.84 stars) and pretty solid sales for a “premium” game from a tiny studio. Most reviews say it’s a more polished game, with an equally strong story and mythology, compared to its predecessor. According to one player, “the initial similarities to king of dragon pass give way to a realisation that this is their new masterpiece. Nuance and depth abound- every corner has been refined and the love in the design is deeply evident.”

We’re still in the middle of porting, adding new features, and fixing pesky bugs. But we’re encouraged by this response and hope to start working on the second Six Ages game very soon.