Category: Status

Many games can be brought to new platforms with some careful attention to the user interface on the new device. In fact, I’ve done this twice (adding iPad support to King of Dragon Pass, and adding iPhone support to Battle of the Bulge). You may need new art assets, and certainly a bit of new coding. But most of the game code is identical.

Back when I started working on Six Ages, this was my plan. Basic development was on iOS, in part because the tools were more reliable. I had experimented with two different solutions to bring that code to other platforms, and was optimistic that I’d be able to just rebuild the game. Then I’d be able to polish it, add support for platform-specific achievements, and start a new testing cycle.

Things didn’t work out as I’d planned. Both of the porting libraries I had expected to use were discontinued (one formally, one not formally abandoned but clearly not viable).

So instead of just recompiling, we were faced with rewriting. That’s a way bigger hurdle. And that’s why it’s taken longer than our original plan.

I’ll discuss this in more detail in the future, but we’re pretty much at the point of adding support for platform-specific achievements. QA has been testing the port, and we hope to bring in outside beta testers soon. Our publisher has suggested that people interested in testing the game sign up on Discord. If you’d rather wait until the last bugs are out, wishlist the game on Steam or GOG.

Today we hit an important milestone: “Ride Like the Wind” for macOS and Windows is far enough along to be declared “Alpha.” Different studios use that term differently, but for us it means it’s essentially feature complete. The various tutorial elements are not implemented yet, and there are a number of known bugs and things to polish. But the UI is all there, and you can play the game. Rusto Games has done a great job adapting to a very different game engine.

Our QA team has started taking a more thorough look at the port. Their available Windows machine had a smaller screen than I thought we could support, but it seemed to run well enough. That’s a good sign. It can also run on a 5120 x 2880 Retina display connected to a Mac.

Once it’s had more testing, and the Guide and Tutorial are in, we plan on doing some beta testing with a small number of players. We’re still planning the particulars with our publisher, Kitfox Games.

Once we have beta feedback, we’ll be in a better position to know a release date. One reason this is hard to know in advance is that it can depend on other games. With a couple hundred games coming out each week, you obviously can’t avoid all conflicts, but there can be games you don’t want to release simultaneously with.

If you haven’t already wish listed the game on Steam, please do. We also expect the game will be on GOG (though they don’t have store pages for alpha software).

App Store

We’re also fixing bugs and added another interactive scene to the game for an App Store update. Thanks to all our players who have reported bugs!

Chapter Two

Meanwhile, we’ve been working on the next game in the saga, “Lights Going Out.” The art style is defined and a reasonable amount is complete. It’s hard to know how much writing we’ll need until you can play the game from start to finish, but I think we’re close to having half the necessary scenes written and coded.

“Lights Going Out” lets you continue a game of “Ride Like the Wind,” so you can determine the next chapter in your clan’s saga. As a practical matter, you might want to save any games you’ve completed.

I’ve been holding off talking about porting Six Ages because the first attempts had early promise but ran into various extreme problems, including life-threatening medical issues. (Fortunately the programmer didn’t die, unlike at least one porting library.) Even now, there’s a small chance that we’ll run into some issue and have to set the clock back. But I’ve seen the game running on Windows and Mac and feel pretty confident that we’ll be able to release on Steam and GOG for those platforms in 2019, as we’d planned. (Of course we’d like to support other platforms but don’t have any news at the moment.)

It’s been a while since I’d done a game port, and I’d forgotten that progress is essentially inverted from normal development. In a typical game, you start by building out enough of the game to play. This is often called a “vertical slice” (though different studios use that term a little differently). The idea is that you have a simple level where you can make sure that movement, matching, or whatever game mechanic works. Then you add polish and all the other levels.

Six Ages (and King of Dragon Pass) were hard to slice like that (since a year of play consists of almost all game screens), but the basic game was working after a while, and we continued to add story scenes, art, and polish.

When you port, the game is basically complete at the start. So once you have enough infrastructure for a vertical slice, you can essentially play the entire game.

With the Six Ages port, basic interactivity went in early, so you could pretty much play any scene (picking responses, choosing wealth, etc.). And that was it. You could only play that scene, because the management screens hadn’t been coded yet. And then when they were, you couldn’t play effectively, because advice hadn’t been hooked up. And so on.

The game is now at the point where all the UI an experienced player needs is working. This means we can start worrying about things like new screen sizes, keyboard support, cursors, and mouse rollover. Plus of course the rest of the UI, such as Guides, Help, and Tutorial. And music, transition, and bug fixes.

That’s still a lot of work, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty about schedule. For example, as I write this we’re still not certain if sound and music support needs to be completely reworked. (If so, that’s obviously an unexpected delay.) Since our goal is a quality game, we can’t suggest a release date.

We’ll let you know when we have one, but the best way to find out is to wish list the game on Steam.

We’ve been moving steadily forward on the next Six Ages game, “Lights Going Out.” It’s in the production stage, and we’re busy creating scenes and art, extending the game design, and coding.

The concept art process let me make a document to guide our artists, and we currently have 7 pieces of scene art complete. (Others are in progress.) And with six new portraits, you can almost assemble an entire clan council from new characters!

There are over 250 scenes briefly described (e.g. “earthquake” or “flood”). 31 are now coded, and can be run.

Other bits of game design are moving forwards as well, such as new ventures and magic. And there’s a new map.

Since this is the second game in the series, there’s a lot that doesn’t have to be created. Although not enough is really working that you can play the game, you can at least run through a game year.

The automated testing has a few rough edges (since some of the unit tests assumed scenes from “Ride Like the Wind”), but it’s been useful catching problems in the game so far. And the game is far enough along that QA can start exhaustive scene testing.

Speaking of bugs, working on the second game accidentally pointed out a problem with the first one. (The fix, enabling many more random rumors, ended up in version 1.0.7.)

Speaking of second game, the mechanics of loading a completed game and continuing are in and working. We’re taking note of various decisions and accomplishments that your clan can carry forward (though you’ll also be able to play without ever having played “Ride Like the Wind”).

I think the biggest advantage of working on a sequel is that scenes can be up and running almost as soon as they’re written, so we can see how they work while they’re still fresh in our minds. There’s a lot less that you have to take on faith will work.

It’s a very different game so even though we know scenes run, we won’t know how they all fit together for some time. But I’m encouraged so far.

P.S. This work is not impacting the schedule to bring “Ride Like the Wind” to more platforms, and we hope to have an update on that soon.

P.P.S. It does mean that fixing bugs in “Ride Like the Wind” has a lower priority, though that’s still happening.

Although it’s a bit of a gamble, I’ve begun working on the second game in the Six Ages series, “Lights Going Out.” This will continue the story of your clan generations later, as Chaos invades.

Development is moving on three fronts. Robin Laws and I have been mapping out the overall story, and have a list of over 150 possible scenes to support it. A small art team is working up concept art for your clan (which has changed over the years) and several new cultures you may encounter. And I’ve started coding, to make sure that games saved from “Ride Like the Wind” can indeed be opened and continued.

This is basically all preproduction. There’s no formal schedule yet, though given the scope of the game it will surely take at least a year of solid production work.

But it looks as if things on all three fronts will work. So I recommend that if you have completed “Ride Like the Wind,” you keep at least one game, so you can write the next chapter of your clan’s saga.

P.S. This work is not impacting the schedule to bring “Ride Like the Wind” to more platforms.

At last, we’re at beta!

In some ways this is just an arbitrary milestone. “Beta” is a pretty loosely defined term, indicating a point in the software development cycle when we think the game is close to the final product, but still has bugs. We don’t expect a lot of design changes, but things are’t locked down. In fact, I made a change to the main menu screen the day after declaring beta. But the main focus now is getting the game shipped.

That has two main components: finding bugs, and marketing.

Our QA team is still testing (especially since one of the last features added was a new scene), and we’re expanding outside testing to more playtesters (we still have a backlog, but let us know if you’d like to be added to it). I’ve also been running some automated tests, but they can take almost half an hour, so that’s not routine.

We’ll be ramping up marketing more once we have a release date. Given that the game involves exploring a story with some plot twists, we don’t want to give away too much too soon. But we’re starting to plan. We do know that we need to do our first video trailer, and need to find someone to help us make one. (Please contact us if you are available to do video production!)

The other aspect is making sure the game is fun, and the right level of challenge. There’s a lot of emergent story that can be tricky. This is another reason we don’t yet have a target date to release the game.

But overall things are going well. We’re definitely on the road to a release candidate.

It’s been a while since we hit feature complete. That shifted game development into a different phase: making everything work. This is both a matter of finding and fixing bugs, and balancing and tuning the economic game and the overall story to make sure things are fun. There’s usually not a lot of interesting things to say, which is partly why there hasn’t been a development blog post in a while. We found bugs, we fixed bugs. Day after day.

We did notice that two of the story themes could intertwine a bit more, so Robin Laws wrote two scenes to deal with that, and another three that deal with individual leaders. Those are now coded.

We invited a small number of outside playtesters to give their feedback, and have been trying to improve and clarify things based on that.

It’s possible to win the game without encountering bugs: one playtester said, “I’m embarrassed to report I haven’t found an obvious bug yet. Did complete a play in easy.” But there still are a lot of issues we need to fix. They may show up only when you get two scenes in a particular order, or have a specific combination of advisors, or choose a play style. Any one player won’t see them, but they need to be fixed. It’s hard to know how many of these there are. And analyzing them can be tricky. Did someone run out of cows because the game is broken, or because they made poor decisions, or because the user interface let them trade away more than they intended?

Between QA and playtesters, we’re still finding enough issues that I don’t think the game is high enough quality to ship in the near future. And a few areas aren’t completely tested (such as making sure every achievement can actually be earned).

There’s another complication to figuring out a ship date: we’re moving. After five years in Philadelphia, A Sharp will be returning to the Pacific Northwest next month. (We’re heading to Tacoma, mostly for family reasons.) Coordinating this and physically moving across the United States is going to take a fair amount of time.

Without a reliable completion date, and with relocation thrown in, it doesn’t make sense to try to release the game this year. (“This year” would realistically mean “before the Christmas holidays,” so there are only 2 months left anyway.)

So we are moving our guess at a release date to 2018. We want to make sure the game is done right, and we want to have some lead time to start marketing.

I’m disappointed that we aren’t done yet, but I think the project is in good shape. As a complex bit of software that’s in alpha, the number of bugs feels reasonable. And one playtester wrote, “I have been spending waaaaay too much time playing this game. I am every bit as addicted to it as I was to KoDP the first time it was released, and I thought I was over that kind of behavior.”