Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Insider news

Hello friends of Pier Solar.

This is Tulio speaking with some cool news. Finally, 1 year after a big punch when we lost much of our pixel art, we finished the development of all critical pixel art and move on to final graphical touches. Also, after 1 month confined with Fonzie in a "bootcamp" experience I'm very happy to say that the main game programming (so called game scripting) has been completed. With those two steps, the game now moves on to the phase of internal testing, or as I'll call it, final beta stage.

That's a very important mark as it means that the game scope is closed to additions and improvements (oh my God, there were so many). We implemented all the new features that will bring Pier Solar to excellence both as Software and as a game.

First fast run on the game took us more than 10 hours to complete. Mind you, a fast run means game without enemies, without ambient NPCs, without extra chests, just what you need to travel between all cities and all dungeons to complete the game without stopping to learn the story, explore for treasures, etc. We're positive that the game will render at least 30 hours of game play considering the rich environment that has been created on every town and the complexity of the dungeons as the game advances.

Next phases on Pier Solar development will go as follow:

- Play test
- Final Pixel Art insertion
- Bug fixing
- Monster/items/magic calibration
- Bug fixing
- Translated texts input
- Bug fixing
- Battle frequency and difficulty calibration
- Bug fixing
- Items price calibration
- Bug Fixing
- More beta tests
- Bug fixing
- Proof reading of all languages
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- Bug fixing
- And maybe more bug fixing.
- Release to manufacture
- Shipping

This doesn't mean that the game is full of bugs, on the contrary, it's playing clean from beginning to end. However, players often do the most unexpected actions and that's what we must cover for. We just want to be sure that we'll test the game as much as it takes to get it on commercial grade bug free status. It's really annoying having to wait a little longer for the game to be completed because there is so many tests and re-tests going on, but hey, it's even more annoying to think of the possibility of the player doing something he's not supposed to then save the game and get it locked forever.

We don't want to allow such thing to happen with Pier Solar so we're insisting on this once more: There will be no rush on the release, it must be perfect. This is not like PS3 games that you can release with minor bugs then update it later... once it's written to the ROM chip it's written forever, so we must be sure that it will be perfect. I know it's boring to wait but trust me: You'll thank me later.

Best regards!