Category: Status

On Monday I decided it was reasonable to consider the game to have hit the Feature Complete milestone.

In software this is sometimes also called “Alpha.” It means that everything we plan to include in the game is complete, at least to a reasonable level of quality. There are still known bugs, and some of the art is still being worked on. (All of it is at least inked, however — see the example work in progress.)

In terms of the project, it means we can invite a small number of external playtesters to try the game and give feedback. The emphasis is on small, because there are after all known bugs, and there are likely to be confusing bits. It doesn’t help if a dozen people tell me that an icon is unclear. Better to hear that from one or two and then iterate.

It turned out that one of the important bugs we found was actually in our bug reporting. The game now does a better job of capturing information about an issue, so playtesters don’t have to jump through hoops to do so.

We’re also starting to get data on how the game is actually played. This has led to some minor tuning, and will surely result in more. We’ll also learn if systems work well, or if anything else would help.

Meanwhile, the QA team is continuing to make sure all the game situations have been exercised and make sense. (We recently had a discussion about whether one scene should be dropped entirely because of changes that had been made since it was written.)

At some point, we’ll have all the art complete, changes made, and bugs fixed. That will put us at the “Beta” milestone and we’ll look for more playtesters. (Don’t ask now! I’m not sure exactly what we’ll be looking for at that point.)

And I still can’t figure out a release date. That will depend on how alpha testing goes. But we are definitely progressing.

The game is still missing a bunch of assets (both art and music), but the user interface is basically complete. There’s a first draft manual, and the game has been winnable for some time. So we’re starting to look at tuning and polish.

QA is still rigorously testing every scene. 89% are completely tested, and most of the rest have at least some coverage.

We’re still finding plenty of bugs, though usually you can keep playing (that is, they’re not severe enough to crash or prevent progress).

Part of the tuning process has been figuring out what the game still needs. I just added a new scene this week, which is one of the reasons it’s still hard to talk about a release date.

I’ve been working full time on Six Ages for over two years, but it’s still not done. How far along is it?

Answering that question is a little hard, partly because I haven’t devoted as much time to managing the status as I have on creating the game. I am pretty sure of one thing: it will not be released this year, as I had originally hoped.

Other than that, I’m pleased with the progress. One important reason is that the budget needed to be significantly less than King of Dragon Pass, and even as development continues longer than I had planned, we’re still OK on costs. And game play is complete enough that you can play a complete game, so we can start improving that. And complete enough that we can tell a lot of things are working pretty well.

One reason that things are taking longer than my original plan is that as we developed the game, it became obvious that it would need more scenes and accompanying art than I had first thought. We now have 40% more scenes, and 59% more scene art, in fact!

More scenes means not only more art, but more time needed to write them, more time needed to code them in our scripting language, and more time needed to make sure that all branches are tested. As I’ve written before, we are done with the writing. We’ve also completed script coding. Testing is harder to measure (since some branches depend on external conditions or chance), but over 3/4 of scenes have had all branches exercised. (Our automated testing isn’t as thorough, though it adds another level of confidence.)

If the art needs hadn’t grown, we would be completing the scene art this month. But there are more scenes. And on top of that, since it’s a different game than King of Dragon Pass, we can’t reuse some art in the same fashion. So there’s still a bunch to go. On the other hand, we have a lot of really good art.

The game is certainly far enough along to start its tutorial. The first draft is nearly complete. Thanks to those who gave input!

Besides finishing the art, a few big tasks remain: music, manual, user interface polish, and a lot of game tuning. That will clearly take us past the December holidays and into next year.

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.