What’s left to do?
Tim and I are very excited to see the project which has been in on-and-off development for the past 3 years finally on its way to being polished and finished.
Having contact with our fanbase via this blog has been really helpful in keeping us motivated and understanding what you want to see in Craig’s rebirth.
Despite the amount of work we’ve done, and despite how the game looks in screenshots and tech videos, there is still a lot to go. We are, as any game studio would be, a little behind schedule but there are good reasons behind this. We don’t want to cut corners to meet self-defined deadlines, and so we have spent much of the past few weeks going over some of the core gameplay elements and redoing large parts of them so that the game is essentially more enjoyable.
This is in part why we are yet to offer a release date – we want to meet and exceed expectations. We want to perfect the game, and that is at the expense of committing to announced deadlines.
So, what’s left?
We are still tweaking and introducing new ideas to the main “conquest” gametype to make it fun, challenging, and unique. There are going to be at least 5 ‘other’ gametypes which need to be put together, too – although these will take significantly less time to do.
The HUD is looking very polished, however there are still lots of small bits and pieces to tweak and add. When we do get around to adding the new gametypes, we will need to adapt some parts to accommodate changes in the game mechanic. Some work on fonts and small images like the cursor or indication icons still need to be done.
On the bonuses/”XP rewards” front, we have about 10 existing in the game, many of which still need tweaking and fixing – another 25 need to be added once Tim has put together the sprites and resources for them. I’m looking forward to seeing which XP rewards get used most, and how people use them to get a strategic edge over the enemy.
The whole main menu structure / look needs to be put together, although most of it has already been planned on paper.
Tim needs to finish off the animations for the remaining enemy tribe leaders. There’s a lot of voice acting to be done, in addition to all the sound effects.
I need to create a save/load script (The gameMaker inbuilt one won’t likely do), a tribe statistics window, a tutorial, and mod/expansion capabilities – this is not a priority, but it will be used to allow for small patches, new dinosaurs or cavemen skins, and new levels without having to release an updated executable (which at this point is almost 50mb in size).
Ricky will begin core work on the soundtrack in just a few days. We hope to show some teasers of the main theme soon =)
Finally, there’s the non-technical side of things.. marketing, contracts, distribution negotiations, pre-orders.. Lots of discussions to be had and lots of work to do.
As always, we’ll keep you updated and in the loop! We’d love to start blogging about some new project ideas soon!
Regards,
Rhys
Well! Good job! Its almost here.
By now I’ve stopped going on YoYoGames though ever since I heard about it I left a bookmark to the site!
And as you promised a looong time ago when I asked.
It will probabbly be before 2012! Even though by now we all know it probably won’t happen.
I’m glad you spent time perfecting than keeping a deadline, since if you had a deadline this game wouldn’t be as great! I’m glad you implented many of the old ideas people suggested when the original came out!
~Yubs/TheYabYab/ZXCVBNMASDFGHJKLQWEetc….
I bet the developers are getting so sick of looking at CC2, lol. But, their hard work will pay off. Oh, an those new avatars for rhys and tim are hilarious!!! lol
Like I’ve said before, we badly want to release the game too!… but we’ve gotta do it right.
Are you an obsessive-compulsive, or are you just really dedicated to game developing?
Kind’ve neither.
We’ve been working on the game for a long time on-and-off and it will be a real thrill and relief to see this game completed.
You mean obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD)? I’d not be surprised if I were, personally.