sandlustgames

Our development process

Added 2019-06-24 15:09:49 +0000 UTC

Since we're working on a roadmap, we thought now would be a good time to talk about our development process. Some of you might be interested to learn how the sausage is made.

Currently we have five people on our team: I'm creating content (text and rendering), next person translates Russian text to English, another edits rendered images into the final product, our programmer is responsible for the engine and servers, and last but least, my assistant helps me integrate dialogs and events into the game.

Every updates starts with a general plan: what we want to see in the game and what functionality we need to add into the engine to make it work (like, say, new locations or a minigame). Then I write down the list of events that might end up in the version. It's usually pretty big and sometimes we don't have the time to implement everything, so we prioritize.

If an update requires a new mechanic (like a poker minigame) or a change in the existing one, then the programmer starts working on it right after the planning.

That's also when I start working on the rendering. The whole thing usually takes around two weeks. The process is very unpredictable because posing can take from 30 minutes to several hours. And that's just the first step, before the rendering and the editing.

As the images finish rendering, I send them to the designer. Usually he's done with the editing by the time the rest of the update is done for the release. Sometimes we render and edit more images than we can put in the game and they get shelved till future updates. That's what happened in 0.12, for example. We had images for new events, but didn't have the time to implement them in the game before the deadline.

Once the rendering is done, I start writing dialogs and events. I usually do it in google docs. I also write the commentaries explaining what's going on along with the text. Once individual event/dialog files are done, I send them to the translator and my assistant starts implementing the texts into the game along with unedited images. Once all text is in the game, we start the most important part: writing all the code to make the whole thing work. What unlocks events and dialogs, what should happen in what order, NPC behavior, etc. By the time this step is done, all text is usually translated and all images edited. Everything gets combined into a "working" build and we start the testing.

Sometimes things don't work out the way we want. Last couple of times we had problems meeting the deadlines and we had to sacrifice some content. Thankfully, you approved the idea of a softer schedule. We still have our internal limits (we think every update should still be released in the same month for all our Patrons from $40 to $5). But now that it's not as rigid, we're not going to sacrifice a series of events just to save one day of development.

Now, about the roadmap. We're thinking of using Trello. If you want to recommend some alternatives, you can leave them in the comments and we'll check them out.

P.S.: And here's the link to the roadmap, where you can track our progress almost in real time.