DesignSo, another month disappears, as breath into the wind (see, I know my Shakespeare), and I've been busy with a job that I've been putting off for a long time; but more on that in a moment.
First, schedules. For the first time in a while, all departments sat down and worked out lists of the jobs that need to be done before the game is finished. In one way it was pretty terrifying to see quite how much there is left to do, but in another it was good to be able to nail down a final list. When you're working on a long term project like this a lot of goals can be left in the ephemeral, "and then we'll do this" kind of state; never quite pinned down and just left as a vague intention, with no real breakdown of the steps involved or the time it will take. Getting to the point where we can actually detail all the jobs remaining is actually a pretty big milestone. We've come a long way, and done an awful lot, and although the list of the work remaining seems long, the mere fact that we can list it all means that the end is in sight. Just maybe not quite as close as we might like just yet.
Which brings me to the main thing I've been doing this month: doing one of those jobs I've been putting off for a while. In the game, you'll be able to buy items which you then use to customise the group of soldiers you take into battles. The idea is that each player will approach missions in totally different ways, and can then share their set-ups with other players in these very forums. These items all need creating from scratch and the hardest part is that they all interact in many different ways, so we have to keep that in mind during their initial creation, as well as all through the long play-testing process. It's a long, complicated job and one that I've been putting off for a while now. Not
just out of laziness, I hasten to add; we also had to be sure that the combat system was finalised before we knew exactly what properties needed to be created for each of the items. After all, it would have been really annoying to define all the items, only to change the combat system, requiring a whole new set of parameters to be created for each of them. However, it's come to the point in the game where it's becoming really annoying to not have these items worked out, so I've had to bite the bullet and get on with it.
Of course, it's not quite as simple as getting a pen and paper and writing done lists of values. The reality is that the numbers aren't going to be right on the first pass. With the best will in the world, you could never model all the complex inter-item relationships, so the only way to see if everything works is to plug the numbers into the game and give them a try. What this means is that I've had to come up with a system that allows us to go back and tweak the numbers and see how all the interactions pan out. So, I've been learning more about spreadsheets.
I've only really used them in the past for doing the most basic of things, certainly nothing with this level of complexity, and so there's been a pretty big learning curve. Like most complex programs, the hardest part is knowing exactly
what a program can do; once you've got a handle on that, the actual learning
how to do it is comparatively easy. But, I'm getting there slowly, and it's all useful knowledge for the future. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.
