So a long hard look was taken, and I’ve decided to drop the majority of the list in favor of a goal of “get the game playable by year’s end”. I just want to test out how it’s coming along already. The list has been reduced to a mere 3 things with 3 weeks to do ’em. It consists largely of building necessary sample content, with a side dish of finishing required features. There’s only really one thing on the list that has been delayed that I regret having to delay since it’ll make the content a little harder to balance, but overall enough major features got done in time that it isn’t a huge deal. I always worry a little bit when producing these tests, because I’m never sure how much the lack of quality of life features affects tester feedback. Even from myself.

So this week was spent largely on planning and building new side quests. It’s also where some doubt began to creep in. It’s a little inevitable for that to happen when you make the tenth variation of the same basic things happening over and over again. Several months ago I talked about quest context mattering more than what you actually do on a quest. Part of the problem is I can’t shut off my game designer brain here that is annoyed that so many of these objectives are so similar. The other problem is my context really, genuinely isn’t that interesting yet. Most of these sample quests are going to end up thrown out anyway, but I’ve really got to work on my technique here. It’s rough trying to come up with a story to tell that takes place in the span of two text boxes.

Then when I start to actually put them in the game proper and the map starts populating with so many different things, I start to feel a little better about it as a whole. Maybe this really is going to work. Just maybe. Now to take a few more steps and find out.