The Banner Saga Post-funding Update #35: Progress Report
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Here's a list of things we've implemented since the last update:
- World travel. Final art, with animated particles like blowing snow, birds, etc.
- Close travel. Final art for a variety of close locations all hooked up as intended in the engine.
- Randomized camp scenes. The player can camp at any point during travel, generating a randomized scene so that no two campsites look the same along the way. In camp the player can manage their units, rest, view the map and talk to allies. All of these systems are hooked up and working.
- Custom combat boards. Final art for the unique combat boards used in part 1. These unique boards are used for key parts of the story, and they'll look special when you come to them.
- Randomized combat boards. You'll often get into incidental fights along the way, usually due to choice you made during travel. These non-story-based fights randomly generate combat boards from a library of pieces that are mixed in matched to make standard fights have some variety.
- The caravan. The traveling caravan now has final art in both world and close travel, growing and shrinking depending on how many people are in your caravan.
- War. When you run across enemies in great numbers you go into "war" mode, a tactical decision where you choose how to approach a large-scale battle. This system has been hooked up with final art.
- Travel HUD. The travel gui at the top of the screen is now fully functional. It tracks all your stats as you travel and the art changes as things like morale improve or degrade. The days cycle and count down and the other various buttons are all hooked up.
- Conversation cameras. The portraits and camera movement for conversation are all finalized. When writing dialogue I can now choose which cameras to use to show characters that are talking. Their names and dialogue are also functional.
- Conversation portraits. We have over 16 playable characters in the saga, and several more NPCs on top of this. All of these portraits are complete and hooked up in the game.
- Conversation backgrounds. When jumping into conversation, the game pulls from a library of images, mixing and matching pieces to create background images that don't repeat.
- Dialogue. Part one of the game now has final dialogue, both in conversation and for events that happen throughout the part. In addition, all the variables are hooked up to this dialogue so that the decisions you make actually function within the game.
- Combat characters. We have many new characters that have not been seen before, and animation is finished for them.
- Combat enemies. The dredge are nearly complete, but several are already in the game. We have begun the process of balancing them for single player combat.
- Combat AI. Computer enemies now function, making smart decisions about what action to take. If you've played Factions you know the combat can get pretty complex. We will be working to improve AI until the game ships but at this time it is completely functional (and fun!)
- Dynamic music. Austin Wintory has been doing excellent work on the score, but he's just as interested in making it emotionally engaging. Combat now takes into account your actions and dynamically generates music to match that. Certain actions in combat (first kill, winning, losing, etc) now seamlessly cue different music to emphasize this. He'll be doing an update about this in the future.
- Travel score. Austin has also drawn up a lot of the music for traveling through the game. It's gorgeous!
- Misc. There are tons of little things that go into putting this all together. We have transitions in place, titles screens, match resolution showing how many fighters you've lost, that sort of thing.
Sounds great, you may be saying, when do we get to see it? The plan is for the next update to show all of this gameplay. It'll also be a promotional piece and the first time people outside the studio have seen the real, functional game. We want to do it right, since it'll probably get picked up by some news sites.
However, we will be at RTX (Rooster Teeth Expo) in Austin this weekend, and showing a lot of this at our booth. If you happen to be in the area drop by!
OVERALL PROGRESS What does Gold Standard mean for the progress of the full game? With everything in our game functioning correctly with final art, we are now working almost entirely on content. Here's a rough outline of how development goes:
Pre-production (art style, broad design ideas, type of game)
Proof of Concept (mock up of what the game would look and play like, basic rules)
Vertical slice (placeholder work on key systems that are playable, to test for fun)
Alpha (most of the game is playable in a rough state, some features still missing)
Gold Standard (a section of the game is taken to completion with final work, all systems are done)
Beta (the entire game is laid out, needs polish and playtesting)
Launch! (the game is done! Or is it?)
Developers can do this in a lot of different ways, which is why the terms above can get confusing. Is something alpha or beta? What does that even mean? Indies especially will just go along doing whatever feels right at the time, but the above is our basic trajectory. Next we'll be creating content for the remainder of the game. This is generally where production starts to move really fast, no longer burdened with having parts of the game that "can't be completed" yet.
