Sunday, December 30, 2012

December Update

At the beginning of the year I'd hoped to be able to release in December, but the new main plot I added, and the loss and having to go back to very old versions of a few key areas, have left me behind schedule by a month of two I think (I'm bad at estimating these things).

December has been almost all testing. I've gone from testing in my test module to testing in the actual game. My test module is set up to test various systems like usable lights, the main quest, and long sidequest chains (the short sidequests like fetch quests are generally quick to test in the real module). In November I finished a run through of the main quest in the test module and moved on to testing in the real module.

This month I was able to run through the main quest in the actual module, get a long since broken sidequest chain fixed, and make my first pass through things being nitpicky and seeing where I want to adjust things like adding usable lights in more areas for "feel".

In the real module I make check things like camera angles, walkmesh, making sure usable items are actually usable in addition to continuing to test quests. There's always tons of little adjustments I make to the game world when I'm at this stage, adjusting conversation wording, making small adjustments to the look of areas.

I'm still working on getting sound levels right (all environmental sound is custom). Putting in commoners and merchants using my commoner ai will be the last thing.

First two screenshots are ingame via the freecam from the debug console. Performance is fine on my pc, I'll be asking for feedback on performance from testers.

The third probably makes builders cringe as to what required that mess of waypoints. Those are actually for my commoner ai, and are placed via prefab groupings of waypoints. They're not there because individual scripts need them, the commoner ai deals with them automatically.