With the start of a new year comes both resolutions and reflections, and while we aren’t quite equipped with promising any of the former, we can certainly offer the latter. 2015 was a pretty busy year for The Land of Glass, and we’d like put out a kind of progress report of sorts. For those interested in the game, it’s only fair you know how far in we are; and for us making it, well, having this out in the open is very helpful.
What follows is a haphazard list of what goes into making a video game and how far we’re in. Please keep in mind that the percents are rough estimates and some categories are much bigger than others.
Maps
We’re defining maps as the level geometry throughout Viterran. If you’ve caught any of our Let’s Builds or our blog posts about the various countries across our continent, then you have a strong understanding of what we’re talking about.
Ice level: 90%
Fire level: 90%
Jungle level: 90%
Sand level: 85%
Wind level: 30%
Swamp level: 25%
Water level: 2%
Neutral level: 2%
Dialogue
We’re defining dialogue as how far a set of characters are through their respective campaigns. In this case, every character is five of eight levels in, completely edited and ready to go.
Kvalt/Tylek: 63%
Pakasoph/Caud: 63%
Herahk/Aros: 63%
Marcus/James: 63%
Art
Artwork is one of the biggest things we have left to do for The Land of Glass, yet some aspects of it shouldn’t take that long to do. The portraits are a bit of a time-sink, but the animations themselves aren’t all that bad because once one walk cycle is completed, it’s just a matter of following that path. The mold’s been created, so now it’s time to replicate it.
Level Tilesets: 85%
Character Portraits: 10%
Character Animations: 6%
Cards
We really can’t estimate how far we are on the card front because The Land of Glass promises to have a lot of them, and “a lot of them” isn’t a number. We’re making them up as we go in a sense, but the good news is they aren’t terribly difficult to make or churn out.
Sounds
Of all the rough estimates here, sounds are probably the roughest since we don’t know exactly how many songs we’ll end up having. We also won’t know how many sound effects we’ll need since we haven’t created every card for this game yet.
Music: 18%
Sound Effects: 5%
Design
We’re defining design as playable and complete levels, equipped with dialogue, enemies, and rewards. The bad news is we have a lot left to do; the good news is this part is that this goes very fast when everything is in place.
Pakasoph/Caud: 15%
Kvalt/Tylek: 5%
Herahk/Aros: 5%
Marcus/James: 5%
Engine
As of early 2016, The Land of Glass’s engine is sitting somewhere near 90% completed. It was the first thing we really started on, and it’ll be the first thing we really finish. I think all we really have left besides some weapon crafting bits is saving, both of which while complicated, shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.
So there you have it. We’re starting 2016 with quite a bit left to go, yet we have a ton completed. Depending on how we play our cards this year, it’s possible we’ll be ready to release before December rolls around.
But as I said above, we really can’t make any promises.