Today is milestone day at Denki. The individual project teams present what they’ve been working on to the rest of the company in advance of demonstrating the game to the project investors next week. I should point out that I’m writing this update from the point of view of someone who isn’t involved with the game on a day to day basis.
First up today was the Quarrel team, who are aiming to have the Alpha build of the game approved next week. How do we judge if the project is ready for that approval? Basically, we ask Mr. Gary Penn if he’s happy to demo the game and declare it ready to be shown to the outside world. Answer: he indubitably is.
In the last month 2 weeks, the team has completed around 450 tasks Really Important Things of Variable Size. These were mostly centred around camera performance, artificial player performance, adding lots of moment recognition to the game (not just Achievements), and generally streamlining the entire player experience around the game. They even parked a few additional rules that had been introduced in order to keep the game moving swiftly along.
We then took a look at version 28 (the previous milestone) and compared it to the latest version (53, fact fans): whoa. Just, whoa. What an incredible difference. It actually looks like you could release it today, but in fact we’re only now ready to start plussing it. Next month we already have around 200 tasks planned out, and that’s only the beginning.
We will, of course, let you know as soon as we have approval of this milestone! We may even release some footage for you…
-David