Frayed Knights: Act 1 Not Quite Ready For Prime Time
Of all the updates on the development of the indie RPG with a decidedly goofy mood, Frayed Knights, I have no doubt that this one will prove the latest one to date!

I have discovered that my old and creaky laptop is no longer quite up to snuff for full-on development of Frayed Knights. I think it may barely be able to play the game, but as the game chews up over 300 megs of RAM when the largest level is loaded, it doesn't leave much on an old 512-meg laptop overwhelmed by numerous OS updates, a virus scanner, and development tools. You know performance is gonna suck when, the third time you are transitioning between major areas, you get a warning that you are running low on paging room in virtual memory.

Guess I shouldn't have been running Pandora and checking my stocks in the background too, huh?

The loss of the desktop - and the unexpected business trip to Puerto Rico - definitely slowed development of Frayed Knights a bit this month, but we still made progress. My new desktop should arrive soonishly maybe (it's already a week late, but has apparently been built and is in QC), so that will help give development a kick in the pants. In the meantime, I have been working where I can, and decided last night to give the entire first act a "run-through." At least starting from the "morning after" the events of the pilot. I knew there were some gaping holes remaining in the first act, but it was past time to experience it as a whole - as a player. Some parts haven't been touched since July, so I'd forgotten a lot of what was done and what was still incomplete.

So I jumped in, starting with Benjamin trying to make up with the other Knights. It's a short little dialog - pretty much a transition from the the more restrictive action of the Pokmor Xang pseudo-tutorial to the main storyline and more open-ended gameplay of the full game. He rejoins the party, after a couple of wince-inducing typos, and the adventure is afoot! Woot!

Oh boy!

Oh, crap.

It was kind of a painful experience. Really. Testers keep asking when they get to test the next version - trust me, you don't WANT to test this one. The list of broken NPCs, broken quests, visual problems, missing text, and otherwise not-working things was pretty frickin' long. Act 1 is not "fully playable" at this point. Dang it. And I was already rolling right along to Act 2... (and Kevin is still working on content for Act 3).

Besides what isn't working or what's missing, there's the stand-in content. Stuff that technically works but is kinda butt-ugly (see above screenshot), and generic off-the-shelf creatures filling in for different kinds of monsters, and just plain ol' empty, boring rooms. Lots of work left to do there. I also realized that there is really not enough direction given to a player who might not be sure what to do next. I need to add significantly more dialog and explanatory text.

So that's the bad news. Is there good news?

Well, yeah. Kinda. If you squint hard, you can see a game playing out on the screen. Most of the pieces are in place for Act 1 now, finally. While not "fully playable," I was able to play for over an hour (and that's cheating to breeze through combats quickly) before a bug left the game kinda--- done (and missing Chloe). With a couple of glaring exception, the questions have mostly now gone from being "What needs to be created?" and "What needs to go here?", to "What do I need to fix?", "What do I need to replace with final content" and "How can I improve this part?" Oh, and the occasional, "WTF?" and "I coulda sworn I fixed this! How can it be broken again?!?!?!"

This means lists. I can work lists. It is long, tedious work, but measurable. We're also steaming ahead on Act 2. And Kevin, as mentioned before, is working on Act 3. Assuming my new desktop arrives soon (and in good condition), progress should be resuming previous speed (or faster, please) in short order.

But for now, to reduce my terror I am going to squint really hard...

Labels: Frayed Knights, game development

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:39 AM (Permalink)