The Development Blog Has Moved

New updates to the Six Ages development blog will be made at our site. We’ll be keeping the archives here.

February Status Update

My specific goals for last month were to get sound and music into the game, continue to build out the UI, and let heroes journey to the Otherworld (King of Dragon Pass’s heroquests). The ongoing goals are to get more scenes into the game, and make sure all of this is bug-free.

Although I did investigate music, the engine is not yet fully integrated. Hopefully next month.

One missing part of the UI was the dialog for embarking to the Otherworld, and that’s now in, as is the ability to display (and thus play) the scenes. And two of the journeys are in.

I’m not trying to polish the UI yet, but I did improve the Saga screen, and allow it to be shown from an interactive scene. The Game Over screen is improved. And there’s now help for management screens.

At the beginning of the year, there were 249 scenes coded and 188 fully tested. As of today, there are 260 coded and 217 fully tested.

On the QA front, last month there were 163 new cases opened, 138 of them resolved, and 110 of those verified as fixed. Many of the remaining cases are UI polish, which I’m deferring for now. Many of the bugs were simply typos, but there were also some more major issues with some of the branching story lines, which took a little longer both to find and fix.

To help QA, I decided to implement multiple saved games, along with the dialog to choose among them. And I’ve made some improvements to the format of saved games, to make it easier to add stuff to the game without breaking older saves.

One tangible sign of progress: Liana was able to play a complete game, to the earliest point where the story results in losing.

Six Ages Status Update

Although Six Ages follows in the footprints of King of Dragon Pass, it’s still a very ambitious project for a small team. We’re trying to break some new ground, and improve on the original game. As you can tell, it’s not done yet. But we have made a lot of progress.

Core

We’re still using OSL (the Opal Scripting Language) to code scenes. It’s now much more change-proof (even during development, changes here no longer break saved games), and supports common use cases like deferred reporting (which was tricky and bug-prone in King of Dragon Pass). Scripts can now be used as subroutines. The compiler detects common errors, and I recently did a little refactoring to support treasures defined in data, not code. Unit tests help verify not just the language implementation, but also scene coding.

The guts of the economic system are hooked up, including the magical blessings that affect them. There’s also a new, simpler approach to managing non-player clan values.

The upgraded combat system is working, though not all the new options have been implemented.

And there are character personalities distinct from the ones in King of Dragon Pass.

UI

With minor exceptions (like displaying achievements), the user interface is all functional. Some screens still have placeholder assets and transitions. None of them have been polished to the pixel level. The plan is to finish this towards the end, since we might end up needing to change the game, or even the UI.

Unlike King of Dragon Pass, the UI is intended to work with multiple screen sizes. We’re still dealing with some of the extremes.

Writing

The original batch of scenes is complete. With them in hand, we’re looking at what else might be needed to flesh out the game. (Some of the new script compiler reports actually gave some hints at this.)

The lore writing and editing is currently in progress.

QA

At this point, about 2/3 of the scenes have been fully tested (i.e. played through all paths of all responses).

Although some classes of bugs are marked for a sweep (reviewing all OSL code once it’s all in the game), most issues are fixed, and verified as being fixed.

Much of the outstanding scene testing involves larger stories with more branching, including the end game.

Compared to King of Dragon Pass, there are a lot more features intended to make testing simpler. These include the ability to inspect clans and the scene queue, simpler scene triggering, and custom scripts to set up specific conditions to test.

And having a command line script that builds the game and posts it to a server makes life so much easier.

Art

We’ve got a bunch of great art. We still need a lot more. There are now four artists working on scene illustrations (Simon Roy, Rachel Kahn, and Steve Lefkowitz join Jan Pospíšil), and one on history illustrations (Damara Kaminecki). The Otherworld art has not even begun, since it’s dependent on lore writing.

Coding

About 90% of the scenes written have been coded. We recently tackled the rather complex end game sequence, so the remainder of the scenes should be pretty straightforward.

Game Play

Without all of the game complete, it’s a little hard to assess. However, you can play for many game years. And the end game is coded, so in theory you could play a complete game (win or lose).