Sunday, July 1, 2007

Great Progress... Until you look at the Chart!

More Maimed God's Saga Screenshots!
I spent a good deal of time on Ossian-related tasks this weekend, but I did get a chance to wrap up two more major maps. You want screenshots, I'm sure, so I'll start there. First, we visit a Lizard Man village in the deep swamps. Below that is a trip to "The Tainted Glenn," though you'll have to wait for the release to see what nefarious activities occur there.

The completion of these two now means that all the maps for Act I are done. However, while I was drawing them up, I began to think that I would perhaps require another small interior map.

SPOILERS!
This is because as I give more thought to the events drawn up for the two paths - either by land or by river - that will form Act I, I am beginning to feel that there is slightly less "meat" to the river path. I'm therefore heavily contemplating adding a small sidequest to the river path. In this case, I'll require one more thus-far unplanned area.
END SPOILERS!

Act I Progress
Again, the inclusion of the other map is by no means set, so for now - regarding Act I maps - "I'm going to claim that milestone. " Sorry, but I'm an engineer in the space industry, and we inevitably talk about what constitutes enough work to claim various milestones... but I digress.

Regarding dialogs, I now have 21 dialogs planned for Act I. All dialogs are classified as Tiny, Small, Medium, etc., and these classifications were used to help me at the planning stage to estimate a total of 27,860 words needed in Act I.

I have currently written 8.4 of those dialogs. The 0.4 is Tancred's, which is big enough for me to justify including fractions of it in my calculations. My original estimate for the words needed for these 8.4 was 9820. My actuals come in at 9323, so I'm not that far off. So the 9820 divided by the 27,860 means I am about 35% done with my dialogs.

I've been scripting conversations and encounters as I go, so I'm going to estimate 35% of my scripting is also done, though there's a lot less hard math to this case.

All This Sounds Good... Until We Look at the Spreadsheet
So I went ahead and drew up a simple spreadsheet to chart my progress so I had something to show people... doesn't look too good. There are, of course, a few things not included in the chart like item and creature blueprints, but these are pretty minor things.

TMGS Progress Report (in %)

Act I Act II Act III
Area Design 100 0 0
Dialog 35 0 0
Scripting 35 0 0
Journals 0 0 0
World Map
0
Intro Movie
0
Music
0

Yup... a long way to go, but I still think I could make a Christmas release. That's what I'm aiming for, and there are still far too many unknowns for me to be able to change that conclusively.

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