Torchlight II Development Update
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We finished our primary goals and moved back into polish. There are two main parts to this - skills, and Acts. Skill polish involves making all the tier bonuses interesting, and finishing up the skills that we didn't show in the Beta, and just generally making sure that everything feels good and is reasonably balanced. A pass has already been done to give everything tier bonuses, but some of them are not as nice as we would like, so we are punching them up.
Act polish is the most time consuming. We have currently split and are polishing Act 2 and Act 3 simultaneously.
So, what does that mean? How 'done' are these acts that we are polishing?
All of the acts exist. ( There are 4, but the 4th is quite small in comparison to the previous 3 ) All of the levels are there, stitched together to form a game. There are events, secret rooms, towns, merchants, the works. They all spawn appropriate monsters, boss events exist, quests, etc. The loot is there. The wardrobes. The NPCs. The cinematics. The 'game' exists.
Polish means taking that and making sure that the individual monsters are fun to fight, that their groupings work well together, that we expose balance issues late in the game ( be they from monster leveling, or skill leveling, or what have you ) and correct them. We want the individual monsters to each have a 'thing' that makes them unique, and interesting to fight in the context of other monsters around them.
I'm polishing Act 2 right now ( the Desert Act - we let people play it at last year's PAX - a lot has happened to it since then ). I'm going to guess that I'm about 3/5 of the way complete with my polish pass on that Act. Marsh is deep into his as well on 3. It is difficult to predict how long exactly it will take to complete an Act's polish - a monsters' ability might take as little as 20 minutes to make, or as much as a day in rare, difficult cases. Sometimes they just feel 'wrong' and you have to bang on them until they feel right, or get creative about replacing them with something more appropriate.
Here's an idea of what polishing an Act entails. Act 2 has two distinct halves - each one centered around its own large outdoor region.
The first half of the act has about 28 unique monster types in it. ( the second half has its OWN unique monsters - although a few from the first half reappear ) Each unit has an ability or two (well, they do now ), and they are grouped between the 5 spur areas off of the first outdoor region. There are 2 boss battles and 2 'superchampion' battles ( these have scripted elements, special skills and areas, and a unique look, but are not quite on the same level as bosses )
Polishing for me meant going through all 28 of those monsters ( several of which were newly created where we felt they needed to be ), setting up their new abilities to complement one another, tuning health, damage, attack rate, behaviors, spawn density, in many cases altering or adding to their sound sets, new and cooler death particles and explosion particles, weapon alterations, and so on and so forth. Often as we are polishing an act we find a 'gap' - it feels like something new should be there. So we fill it.
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It's progressing well. I'm really happy with how Act 2 is feeling, and I think it will feel very different and fresh compared to the previous Act ( which is what we want ).
Everyone else in the company is doing the same sorts of things. Mostly, they have the time to add more love because Marsh and I are still finalizing polish on the monsters, bosses, and skills. This lets our Level Design team, for instance, squeeze in some extra rooms, or more neat random events.
