Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Here's the plan!

When you have your nose to the grindstone for so long, sometimes you lose sight of just how much progress you've been making. A recent conversation with THE FONZ has shone a light on just how far we've come. We made a checklist of everything that was yet to be completed and that list just seems to keep getting shorter everyday.

We won't announce a release date, but we can give you a run down of what's going to happen after the game is complete.

After the last line of code is written, we'll begin our QA testing. The process should be pretty laborious but luckily the game isn't as complex as, say, a 3D action game, so organizing the process and narrowing down every little bug should be a fairly simple task. We're committed to providing at least a full month of QA testing but, depending on how broken our Beta Candidate is we may devote more time to it.

Rest assured we haven't put this much effort into building a game that will crash on boot.

Once the QA testing is done and we're confident that the game is clean we'll begin the manufacturing process. Since we're a small venture this process will take a little bit of time. We'll be shipping each game in order - so if you've ordered later expect the game to take some time to get to your door. We'll let everyone know how the manufacturing process is going as it happens so hopefully you all won't be left wondering where your game is.

On the Dev side we're kicking it up a notch to get things out the door as quickly as possible. You've all been waiting for a very long time but we're almost at the end of the road.

Thank god. Because I want to play this thing as much as you all do.

Cheers!

-WM

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Words.... so many words...

We've mentioned on the forums that our script is unusually large for a Genesis RPG and a lot of that has very little to do with the core script. We've taken care to populate each city and town with lots of NPCs and unlike most 16-bit RPGs what they have to say is actually (GASP!) interesting.

We've treated each of the little guys as mini-stories. Stories that are unrelated to the core plot, but will nevertheless evolve with the main game. Most of them have multiple lines of dialogue in each "chapter" and then as events progress those lines change.

Usually there are a, b, and c sets of lines. So on average, we'd guess that each NPC has around 7 - 10 lines throughout the plot. We haven't looked at the NPC script as a collected whole, but I imagine it's almost as big as the core script.

You better actually talk to them or all that work will be for naught!

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

My brain is no work good.

Whoo...

Umm...

*Awkward*

Hi everybody! I forgot about this for the second week in a row. That's embarrassing. But here we are! Humbled and ready to provide you with more weekly snippets of the development process.

There are a couple of reasons we've missed these though. First, we're all still working hard on the game but more importantly there have been some exciting developments in the world of Pier Solar and Watermelon. We can't discuss details but rest assured that they are exciting enough to be keeping us up at night.

Here's a hint: We may all be knighted because of it.

Is that a real hint?

Here's a hint: No.

We've also been pretty distracted by E3. Or at least I have. I don't normally discuss non-WM related stuff here but Fumito Ueda's latest is worthy of these hallowed halls. If you don't go out and buy The Last Guardian the moment it comes out I'm going to take you all outside individually and slap you in the teeth.

Slapped. In. The. Teeth.