We began with infrastructure work. Like King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages is set in the mythic world of Glorantha. Robin Laws and I developed the specific elements of the setting (consulting with Jeff Richard and Greg Stafford). And I got a team of concept artists to sketch what it would look like. Jan Pospíšil has continued to add sketches.
I wanted to continue using OSL, since it works well for the sort of interactive scenes that Six Ages will use. But I wanted to make it a lot more flexible, so it would be easier to update the game (or even do another some day!). The implementation of OSL used in King of Dragon Pass is very specific to particular versions of the game. So I came up with a better approach, which meant reworking the scene compiler as well as the runtime. This enabled a way to test all the scenes, which in itself means it was worth the investment.
Robin and I also discussed what elements of game play would be the same and what would change, both to support the story and to make it easier for players (and designers) to understand. For example, we wanted to make certain warnings easier to spot, without having to check advice or be faced with an alert. And we wanted to make it easier to tune the impact of leaders on executing player decisions.
Once we knew this, it let Pat Ward (who I’d worked with at Shenandoah) and I come up with a user interface design for the game. One goal was to better support multiple screen sizes (which can be tricky in a game). I have implemented much of Pat’s design, but haven’t polished it at all. My goal was to make all the screens work, but not spend a lot of effort making them right until we’re sure the game works.
Also on the art side, I got to work with one of Moon Design’s artists to make a great new map.
Meanwhile, Robin was writing scenes. With me doing infrastructure and design, there was a huge backlog of scenes that were written but not in the game. I got Jeff Dougherty (who I’d worked with at Shenandoah) to help code them into OSL. And once enough of those were in, Liana Kerr began exhaustively testing them.
Right now, there are 266 scenes written. 161 have been coded, and proved to run. 23 have had all branches tested. There are definitely enough scenes in to start giving a feel for the game. As Robin said on our Slack,
It has enough scenes now to give it that great addictive, potato chip quality of KoDP. "I'll just do one more and then stop... okay, one more... what, it's Sacred Time again already?"
However, right now I would say the game is runnable but not playable. You can certainly get a taste, but can’t really perform all the actions you would do in a game year.
It turned out the original concept art wasn’t quite detailed enough for the player’s clan, so we have continued to work on that. It’s finally to the point where we can produce illustrations for the game.
 |
| But this is a screen shot. |
So one year in, we’ve made a lot of progress. The game is still a long way from being done, so it is definitely early to talk about a release date. Which also means it’s too early to talk more about any game play specifics.
But we have a game that can run scenes and save state. It handles multiple screen sizes. It has most of the underlying economic model hooked up, including magic. It has some great art. There’s still a lot of production to go, and tuning and testing of game play (as opposed to specific scenes) has not started. But I think we’re on track to make a cool game.
