Stress and More Stress

As many have probably noticed things have been really busy around the SAGA offices lately. We’re getting dangerously close to release and there remains a mountain of tasks to be done. It’s always hard to reach the point on a project where you realize you are going to have to cut things you swore you’d never cut. It’s frustrating and you pull your hair out trying to figure out how you can get in that “last feature” but finally in the end you realize that you just have to stop or you’ll never release the product.

There are of course many things that will still be done before release – naturally we’re going to finish up the GUI, continue development on the tournament system, and go through numerous other stability checks and evaluations. I’m hoping we get more time to polish things like particles as well. I imagine we could spend several months still cleaning up things like particles, sounds, and graphical glitches.

Being an indie developer has been a lot of fun but it leaves you with lots of tasks you’d normally be able to push off to someone who is probably more skilled at it and has a lot more time to do it right like the manual – I can’t believe we’re at the end and we still don’t have any sort of official manual for people to reference! It’s coming though so don’t give up on it yet.

So what comes after release? For me the big feature is going to be the world conflict system. I did everything I could to make sure it made it in for release but it was just too big to get done in time. Another big post release goody will be the next faction which will round out the Brotherhood quite well. It’s almost necessary to get that in before world conflict or the poor Brotherhood folks would suffer at the hands of the Order too heavily. I’m aware there is a lot of interest in what the world conflict system is and I think pretty soon I’ll be freed from the bonds of silence so expect more information when I get a chance to post.