Well these past two weeks have proven to be far more busy than I had anticipated, yet I have very little to show for it Vinland-wise. Because this would make a very boring blog post, I am going to focus more on the exploits of Pendor this week, and I hope you find it as interesting as the usual book-related stuff.
First I’ll give you a little update on Vinland, at the moment I am hashing out the various characters and their interactions with the rest of the cast. This is all quite classified, so I cannot really show you much of what has been happening. Once that is done, my intention is to draw up a timeline of events, including all the problems and challenges which the characters are due to face (the trials and tribulations are after all what makes a book interesting!) from there I can then get back to writing, and will be able to tell you more about Vinland again.
As you know I am the lead designer for Prophesy of Pendor, and I find a lot of my time is diverted to that. Because of the new time constraints, I am going to move the blog entries to only twice a week. One will be published on Tuesdays, and one on Thursdays. This week has been more about Pendor so the majority of this update will be focused on that.
I love my work there, but lately it has been testing the limits of my management skill. For example I recently promoted one of the programmers to the Lead position, however two days later he dropped off the face of the earth. Whether something has happened to him, or he found the new role overwhelming, I simply do not know. This is one of the problems facing virtual teams – you do not know the people with whom you work personally, and if they do not reply to emails there is little that you can do.
Never the less, this left the programming team without direction so I decided to take the plunge and become more hands on with what they do. This began with an email to the team telling them the situation, and then setting a number of tasks for them to do. As my mentor once said, “Align then raise. Validate then suggest.” Oddly this is not one of the things they taught us at Brighton, so I am grateful for that advice. Now the plan is to have a working alpha version in place so that we can try out the various factions we have introduced, and get a feel of the world. From here we will be able to add in the features that the design team have been discussing.
Speaking of the design team, we have settled on releasing a preview for Pendor 4, every two weeks and this week was one of those weeks. You can find the latest here : PoP4 Preview. Even if Mount and Blade is not really your interest, you can see quite a bit about how we develop the various factions in that post. First you have the lore (the dialogue between a Knight of the Radiant Heart and the Mercenary Commander), followed by some of the concept art. It then goes to explain in more detail about the faction, and because this is primarily a combat game, how they fight. The descriptions of the units are what was actually given to our coders for use in creating those specific soldiers, and their job is to convert those words into the numbers which will become the attributes of each unit.
No comments:
Post a Comment