The third world disk is done at last! After over three months, ugh…
Yeah, that took longer than I thought. I did a lot of new tile graphics which slowed things down. I also completed all monster graphics as I went along; that was one of those tasks that was easy to switch over to when I wasn’t in the mood to write dialogue. Monster statistics are another story, but I’ve found the best way to do those is in beta-testing.
Out in real life, a lot of other things interrupted as well. Lots of stuff to get done around the house, a convention to attend, hurt my knee, finally am on a diet and trying to lose weight, etc.
The good news is, I just have one world disk left to go! I’ve already plotted out the dungeons and content pretty well, so there will be less to do, I think. I got some new graphics to do but not nearly as much.
One aspect of the 3rd disk was that I combined doing both mobs and transactions at the same time. This helped to move things along better, it’s also why the percentage complete remained identical between the two.
I did notice that drawing up all maps ahead of time created issues where I forgot what I was thinking with particular maps. I need a more integrated approach to ensure things get done, so I’ll be trying to do that with the 4th disk.
Creating content for CRPGs is a very time consuming process. I personally think it is more difficult than programming the actual game engine itself.
It can be! In particular, it depends greatly on the tone of the game you want to make.
A step that’s coming after I complete the last disk is to actually look at the overall picture of content and determine if I need to add more here, trim there, etc. I’m hoping I can do that while I have some beta testers hammering the engine.
For my own game, I decided on 20 cities, 20 villages and 20 dungeons right from the start and then created the necessary content for these accordingly. However, it took me 100 hours to solve my own game (from beginning to end) with the city and dungeon maps handy. So for those who don’t have access to these (which is everybody else), this is a 200 hour game.
Yeah, one of the challenges as a solo developer is NOT making a game too difficult because you’re using yourself as the threshold… Forgetting that you have knowledge and access to information regular players won’t have.
Quantifying a count of towns, villages and dungeons in my own game is tricky because it’s really just “maps”, including the world, and dungeons could be one map or many… Did a little math and abstraction, I came up with 25 “towns” or places you talk to people and buy stuff, and 25 “dungeons” which would be a single place with lots of things to kill and loot.
Jeez, you two are really swinging for the fences with your respective games. Those psuedo-stats are higher than any of the CRPGs I’ve played on C64 and DOS! These are HUGE games (and adamantyr jumped into the deep end going right for the record without first creating a lesser CRPG to train his thinking on)!