LordArioch

News From the Six Realms #62 - The Road Ahead

Added 2021-04-18 19:43:17 +0000 UTC

Hello everyone and welcome to this month’s update,

I’m only going to be talking about one thing today, and that is what remains on the path to completion for Act I. There’s been some chatter about how there’s not a lot being done on the game, which is demonstrably false (with the addition of Exagie, releases are larger than they have ever been) with a cursory running of lint, however it is easy to see why some people think this is the case. Yes, the main story for Act I is pretty much done now, bar the epilogue that follows the fall of Rastedel, so the game has not been expanding in a linear fashion. There is still a lot that needs doing though to both improve the experience of playing the game, and to wrap up the side stories moving in the next arc.

So, we’ll start with content. The main things that need doing in this area are the remaining NPC arcs, the fae narrative arc, the Rastedel epilogue, and the goblin recruitment quest. As things stand, only Cliohna and Greyhide have complete arcs, with Shaya and X’zaratl having substantial work done on theirs. Most of the castle staff, including the twins, need plot arcs of similar, or in some case, larger, size, and while these have been split between the writers, they are going to take some time. The above also includes Alexia, who needs clear arcs for all of her job events. Hooky has already started reworking the Fae events and will continue over the next few months, leading to the end of the Fae arc for Act I. That just leaves the epilogue and the goblin quest, both of which are important parts of the main plotline, and will require quite a bit of work. We are also looking at reworking the prologue in order to improve it.

Moving on to programming, large chunks of the skill rework have now been done, but Dragoon still needs to implement the changes to Cla-Min’s shop, the spy system, as well as code the new systems of battle readiness and chaos incursions. While he is doing that, Rein and I have to recode and test all the Ruler, Orciad, and Rastedel events that used code (such as skill checks) that is now obsolete.

On the art side, as mentioned in the past we have almost caught up with the backlog, and Sommy has now tackled the lion’s share of reworking the CGs into a more consistent style. Once he has finished with those, he will work on revising the castle and background art, before moving on to adding more variants and animation.

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Finally, we also have to continue to add QoL features, and polish the game. This means sourcing and adding new music and sound/video effects, add transitions, hunt down bugs and typos, and add missing features like the scene replay gallery.

So, as you can see, while the game looks close to completion, there is still quite a lot of work to be done before we get over that final hurdle. As always though, we will continue to work hard to get new releases out on time until all of the above tasks are complete and we move on to Act II. Speaking of releases, the next one will be May 30th, and I’ll be talking about what it will entail in the next News for the Six Realms. In the meantime though, I hope you all have a better idea of what we are working towards now, and are looking forward to what is to come.