Status – Six Ages Development Blog

Gold Master

Six Ages 2 is now at “Gold Master” status. All three stores (Steam, iOS App Store, and GOG) now have what is almost certainly the final build. We’re not dropping a gold CD-RW off at manufacturing (like the 1999 release of King of Dragon Pass), but there’s still some lead time most of the digital stores need. As do reviewers.

Priests in tattered robes bearing the fire rune offer us a nearly life-size statue of a golden man. Given the weight of gold, they visibly strain to hold it up for our inspection.

Everything is still on track to release on 21 August. You can wishlist the game (on Steam or GOG), or pre-order from the App Store.

The QA team and our beta testers are still finding issues, and we have a bunch of them fixed and lined up for an update. But they’re minor or deal with unusual situations. I want to thank all of them for helping get the game into a good state.

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.

Facing the Music

Six Ages: Lights Going Out has been Feature Complete for a while. We’re still testing it, and pushing towards Content Complete. One aspect of that is composing the music. The game takes place generations later, and things are very different, so while a few pieces will be the same, most need to be new. (To save time, the various UI-related sound effects will be the same.)

There seems to be no shortage of freelance composers out there, but I sort of accidentally found Neha Patel via Twitter (before Elon Musk began ruining it). We had a discussion about game soundtracks, I checked out her portfolio, and asked her to fill Stan LePard’s shoes. The fact that she knew who he was was a plus (it also speaks well for how Stan tried to help out other composers).

My basic design approach is to look at the events and come up with a couple dozen themes or categories. Many of these ended up the same as Ride Like the Wind — “Strife,” “Request,” “Opportunity” — but some situations are different, and I also decided to add some new categories. So music may be called “InternalPolitics,” “ExternalPolitics,” or “Decay.”

A farmer inspects ice-covered furrows. A scarecrow is in the background.

I prepared a list of these, and then for each one, made a short text file describing how the music will be used. I also include 2-4 illustrations to help Neha see the mood we’re after. Here’s Decay:

The world is getting worse
This music is used when the situation involves the overall deterioration of the world. This could be the failure of large political institutions or trade networks, acid rain, crumbling walls, climate change (in this game, it’s cold), greed, imminent starvation, toxic clouds, abandoned temples.
These are all bad situations, but they aren’t overtly supernatural or related to the forces that are explicitly trying to destroy the world.

The purpose of the music is to evoke a feeling, so when Neha sends a draft, I run it by Elise Bowditch, who also reviewed the music for Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind and King of Dragon Pass. I play it without explanation, and get her thoughts. Does it suggest monsters? impending doom? annoying neighbors? Does it feel optimistic or despairing? Elise is good at describing (one piece sounded like a “circus of horrors”). If it doesn’t seem to fit, we may need a completely new approach.

Assuming there’s a plausible match, we can then worry about specifics, like whether crashing cymbals are appropriate or the instruments should be swapped out. Occasionally a piece that really isn’t working can be radically transformed by changing an instrument.

Or sometimes a piece that didn’t give the right feeling for one situation ends up working fine for another.

We’re still in the process of creating music, but it’s coming along nicely. I kept hearing “ChaosHorror” in my head even when I was working on other stuff, which I consider a good sign.

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.

Not Branching

Although people sometimes describe Six Ages (and its predecessor King of Dragon Pass) as “choose your own adventure” games, they are definitely not branching narratives. Choices do lead to other choices, but not along a predefined path.

Branching content can give the player a lot of choice, but even if you have only two choices for each decision, you can end up with a huge number of paths. And you’ll be creating content for pathways that will only rarely be visited. There are a variety of techniques creators use to deal with this. Six Ages and King of Dragon Pass address the problem by not turning their decisions into branches.

I’ve written (and spoken) before about how KoDP and Six Ages avoid the combinatorial explosion of branching by providing a political-economic framework to give your choices context and meaning. The narrative is broken into what we call “scenes” (they can also be called “floating modules” or “storylets”). Scenes are often picked at random, though with conditions to make sure they’re relevant or interesting. Typically they’re written to work in any situation. For example, a neighboring clan wants something from you. Whether they’re unfriendly or your allies makes a big difference, as does whether you can afford to pay what they ask (either in wealth or relations with other neighbors). Your response affects relationships (turning down a request has the potential to end an alliance), wealth, or internal politics (your own people have opinions too). This gives an implicit connection to the next scene (we lost a friend, we’re broke, people are grumpy, etc.). Essentially, most scenes connect to other ones—less directly than by branching, but more flexibly. And it’s easy to have more than two choices, to give players a wider range of action.

One way scenes connect seems rare in narrative games: a choice may trigger another scene at a later date. Plenty of story games have a time element (either by each choice advancing a clock, or treating time loosely and advancing the clock when conditions are met). The multi-generational scope of Six Ages means we can run a followup scene a year (or more) later, after ten player actions and another batch of scenes. For example, if you claim poverty, your neighbor may tell you they’ll be back next year. This is arguably a branch, since you made a choice and it leads to a repeat of the event. But intervening events may have changed the context, or invalidate the followup (for example, if a feud breaks out they won’t be back with a friendly request). It’s much more an emergent narrative than a branching story.

Diagram showing connections between scenes and responses

Six Ages does have scene sequences that are pretty close to a standard branching narrative. These tend to be a lot more complex for the QA team to test, since all the possible paths through the set need to be traversed. This is the chart that Jess made to track how a 6-scene sequence worked. The lines of flow are mostly implicit connections—choices in the second scene can impact your choices in the third or fourth scene, etc. They aren’t branches—in most cases, previous choices don’t preclude possible responses. But they’re distinct paths that provide context.

Our writer, Robin Laws, just finished writing another set of related scenes for Six Ages: Lights Going Out. I just finished coding them (into our OSL scripting language) today, so QA hasn’t had a shot at them. But I did my own chart to help with coding, and hopefully with testing. (This one just shows scene flow, not individual responses.)

Without the direct branching of “If you attack, turn to page 24,” sequences like this make use of state variables to keep track of what happened previously. This is hardly unique to Six Ages. All the scripting languages I’m familiar with let you do that. This sequence seemed particularly variable-heavy, however. I counted 25 variables that coordinate between 8 scenes. Some of this is for narrative continuity (what we learned and who we learned it from), tracking how often something has occurred (it may not be possible to do it again, or it may impact how easy a course of action is), which leaders were prominent in a previous scene, or magical effects. Not surprisingly, there’s an additional variable that can relate your decisions here to scenes that aren’t part of this set.

The goal of all this is to tell an interesting story that emerges from multiple player choices (not just story choices), unfolding after multiple game years. Almost as important, if you replay the game, you can make different choices for a different story—but even the same choices can give a different story, because the events can take place in a very different context.

August Update

I don’t have to tell anyone that this has been a strange year. I don’t know if I can really blame 2020 on the lack of blog posts, however. Some of the progress is hard to show, and we want to have a few surprises when the next game comes out.

The COVID-19 pandemic did impact things. We’re pretty sure one team member caught it but had almost no symptoms (and at a time when there wasn’t any testing to confirm it). Otherwise there hasn’t been any direct impact, since the team is distributed and people work out of their homes. But that is still very different when other family members are now doing that too, or you can’t leave your home. So we’ve all been affected.

An Orlanthi magician is about to hurl a lightning bolt

Despite that, work on the next game, “Lights Going Out,” has proceeded. Currently, 317 scenes have been written and coded. Two thirds of them have been exhaustively tested. (For comparison, “Ride Like the Wind” ended up with 364 scenes.) Most of the non-scene writing hasn’t started, though there are currently two rituals running. (One of those may need to be reworked.)

We have a lot of great art. I don’t know quite what our target is here (since a lot depends on the not-yet-written scenes). But more has been completed so far this year than in 2019.

Although most testing has focused on individual scenes (the “trees”) in isolation, we have done some QA based on just playing (the “forest”). I think you could play for 13 years before running out of yearly content. So while it’s not at all balanced yet, the basic game still works fine.

A shaman sits with her drum, spirits swirling about her

Although the basic game is the same, different things matter. The game takes place generations later, so factions other than the Seven Families are important. And you’ll possibly be interacting with the supernatural in different ways. Plus, the supernatural will impact you in different ways. I’m in the middle of tweaking the map for this.

And speaking about both games, you can indeed load a game you won and continue it. A number of factors are brought forward. At least one was something that we hadn’t originally planned for. (You can certainly play “Lights Going Out” without having won or even played “Ride Like the Wind,” though we hope it will be a richer experience if you have.)

As I mentioned in December, we’ve also been prototyping some ideas for a different game. As I write, its fate is unclear. For what it’s worth, as a separate project it hasn’t affected the “Lights Going Out” schedule.

Unfortunately, that schedule still isn’t solid. It’s taken longer to get here than I’d like, but I think we have made considerably progress during a challenging year.

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.

Gold Master

The PC (i.e. Windows and macOS) version of Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind has reached “Gold Master” status!

While we are not actually shipping a CD off to manufacturing (like we did 20 years ago for King of Dragon Pass), we have a build that we can submit to Steam and GOG for their approval and release process. This also means that reviewers can be looking at a final build.

To get to this point, Rusto Games has been busy fixing bugs. And we’ve had our own QA testing as well as very helpful beta testers trying to find bugs. (QA also has the task of making sure bugs are actually fixed.)

The final phase is working with our publisher to make sure the stores are set up for release on 17 October.

Windows and Mac Release Date

It’s been a long road, but we are planning to release Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind for Windows 10 and macOS on 17 October!

https://twitter.com/KitfoxGames/status/1176873996249370624

It will be available on Steam and GOG, and you can wishlist it on either store.

We’ve updated the screen shots at sixages.com so you can see what it looks like on a computer. And our publisher, Kitfox Games, made an updated trailer.

P.S. We have no news today about other platforms.