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.