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