It was redesigned and simplified (and even there was a budget to add some frills), now I have even a cutting edge feature called “Undo” which is super fun since it’s the first time even any of my editor has it!Īll right, lets talk a bit about features that are visible to you as a player. Which might sound boring and unimportant but is a huge help, since it allows a lot flexibility and convenience for me as a designer. A big part of it was reimplementation of the map structure to abstract entities (now you don’t put “tile with a tree” but abstract “tree” shape of variant #3). The aim, and the top priority, was to produce better tools for me, to speed up development. So, what actually was done after the project was officially announced? Well, first all experimental assets were evaluated and it was decided what will be put into the game, analysis of the first game was made (part of it was listed in other posts ) and the coding started. Basically, the game was extended and polished before it started (note for example the full gamepad support, dozens of tiny fixes, save system redesign, etc) and part of it was done in order to speed up future porting to other platforms. Note that 5% difference might sound like not a lot but it’s actually quite significant (to put it into a perspective bananas share 44.1% of genome with humans, yup). So, actually, art of the coding for the sequel was done before the project officially started. I was polishing the original source code for a few years, in extend beyond the simple support of an existing game, in order to keep the code as similar as possible for as long as possible. The other nice thing is the source code, which is like 95% (probably) identical to the first Amberland. So, quite a lot was ready before it even started. I ordered art assets and music from contractors, so they were experimenting and producing some content without my direct involvement. The first is made using a mix between evolutionary prototyping and a research project methodology, the second using the old classic waterfall model.Īgain, the unusual thing is that a lot was done before the project officially started. Project “A” which is about technical improvements (coding) and project “B” which is about making the actual game (content). To take this specific situation into account, development was divided into two projects. In short, this project is made quite differently to all my previous projects. RPGs are content driven, so, once you have a solid code base not that much changes actually in the programming department. But with a sequel to an RPG it is a totally different story. Typically (read always) the bottleneck is coding. It’s not the first sequel I made but the first sequel to an RPG.
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