Originally Posted by
dra600n
I really wanted to avoid this question, because there's no fun answer to it, but rather than avoiding it or giving some fluff answer, I'll just go through the whole story of it and why its where it's at. (I would've responded sooner, but I was at work and didn't want to half-ass my response)
When I started Affinity Sorrow, I had only done 1 console project before that - Hangman SG. As we all know, if you leave the music and art to me, you'll get Hangman SG :) (Granted, I can make decent music now, and could probably do passable graphics, but I would like to eventually finish the game lol).
I had searched out for graphic artists to take on the art responsibilities, and found a composer. I had contacted WM, but their contract was a bit iffy (spoke with Tulio about some things and cleared all worries and such). The issue was they wanted a sum of money I couldn't afford at the time. I had found a few more artists, but the same situation - money I couldn't afford at the time. I eventually found one that decided he wanted to do profit sharing, and I thought that was awesome. Unfortunately, he ended up having to leave the project for health reasons, so I was kind of stuck.
The first composer I had decided he wanted to do random music for the game (like, the final boss battle music), and didn't like that we wanted the music in order to go with development, and left. I found a replacement composer shortly after, and I've used her for everything since. This all went on while we still had an artist. Once the artist had to leave, it's been stagnant since. Sort of. I've reignited the project here and there, but at the time, I was definitely underestimating the size of the project and the work involved.
Since then, I've done the Felix release and 5 commission projects, SecondBASIC, and now Harvy. In between each project, I've done more planning and such with Affinity Sorrow and trying to really turn it into something. I would've started it back up sooner, but the reality is, I was very inexperienced with Genesis programming, and while I'm a ways away from some of the true coding masters in the community (chili willi, sik, stef, gasega68k, just to name a few), I've learned a lot and have come a long way since Hangman SG, and I think I'm almost ready to dive into that project for real.
So what is done?
- The battle algorithms are done (combat damage, power attacks, spells, skills, etc). Of course, this has only been done on paper and in a battle simulator app I wrote to test it out and check the numbers. The other part is, is this is most likely incomplete since new skills/functions may need to be added.
- Most other algorithms are finished (encounter rate, level related algorithms, drop rate algorithms, etc)
- Story "skeleton" is done. What I mean by the "skeleton" is I know the beginning, middle, and end of the story, most of the major characters, and in between events/story related plot points known. It's mainly down to ironing out the plot, filling in the gaps where they need to be filled, and then create all of the dialog.
We're also working on a new mapper to allow potentially up to 16 MB of data (well, theoretically it'd be however large you want to get), though I can't see why I'd need that much space :P
So, giving an estimate of percentage done, I'd say maybe 5% to 10% is done, and needing 100% of everything :)
