Technical Difficulties

Obviously, we're several weeks behind schedule. One of our team members withdrew his hardware from the project because he needed it at home, but we should have it replaced before the end of the week, and then we can continue production. Sorry for the delay.

Demo

It occurs to me that anyone coming here who isn't from RPGMP is probably going to be wondering where they can get the demo mentioned in the first post.  It's only available at RPGMP, and since I don't want the place to be innundated by a bunch of non-developer tribbles making egregerious numbers of accounts just to get the demo, and since I don't want any non-devs to get the demo until we release the Ep. 2 demo to everyone (which should be by the end of this week), I'm not giving an address or saying what RPGMP stands for, except in that I will confirm that the first three letters do not stand for rocket propelled grenade.

The public demo will be available by 1:00 PM on Friday, and it will include both episodes.

SimVillage

SimVillage is probably an actual game produced by Will Wright at some point, since we've had a Sim of just about everything (SimTower, SimIsland, SimEarth, SimAnt...), but in context of Arcana it refers to the system whereby you build your village from the ground up.  From the outside it'll always look the same, a bunch of buildings of various shapes and sizes (actually, they're pretty much all squares or rectangles, but you get the point), but the interior changes depending on what you designate each building to be.  Lumberjack, Blacksmith, Factory, Mages Guild, etc.  It's a really complex system that includes about a dozen different variables just in keeping track of the building material, goods, luxuries, and manpower required to build these things, and the individual door events on each building are gigantic labyrinthes of conditional values and variable controls.

Also, since the XP event page program doesn't have a find and replace function that I know of, the variable that tells the system what kind of interior a particular building will have has to be manually changed every time.  The whole process takes only five or six minutes, but it's dull and monotonous and, since there's about eighty buildings all told, daunting.  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to the salt mines...

Into the Breach

It's probably a bad sign when the producers of a game fail to produce a development blog until they've already completed a demo, it's certainly a failing on the part of the marketing department, which is convenient because we don't have one. That blasted marketing department! They never get anything done!

Anyways, Arcana, a satirical fantasy RPG, is finished. I mean, sort of. It's built to be episodic so that if the project turns out to be more difficult or time-consuming than we anticipated, we can cut off at any one of two dozen intervals between episodes and the game won't leave too many loose ends lying around. Sure, half the villains are still lurking out there in their evil lair, no doubt planning to invade the kingdoms of Arcana once again, but you still beat them off and crippled their armies, right?

The problem with this, of course, is that unless we get to the very end of production (unlikely, given we're releasing in June no matter what), we're not going to have a very satisfying climax. You'll defeat another one-off villain who's more or less unrelated to all the rest except in that he's slightly more powerful, or maybe you'll defeat a villain who's popped up once or twice before, but you'll still be left with a feeling that this was not the most climactic climax. Still, that's a small price to pay given that we can release a completed game in June no matter how far we get, the reason for that being that episode one, about two weeks in the making, is finished (future episodes should take less time to produce since we're much better at using the system now).

Of course, now comes the most difficult part of all, where we have to adapt our RPG engine into a psuedo-city builder, something which is already going to require about three dozen variables and which can only get more complex from there (complex to code, not to play, playing it should be pretty intuitive), in order to build player attachment to their home base in Hrgrgsville. Not that there's any particular reason we want you so attached to Hrgrgsville. We have no plans. Honest.

-Ashen