Oof! We finally just hit our alpha milestone… everyone at Nihilistic has been quite busy cramming in every last feature, texture, or model that needs to get into the game to reach feature complete. It’s been a tough road so far but having this weekend off completely is a nice refresher, especially with the great weather outside here in California right now.
From here the programmers largely need to fix bugs and nothing else. It can get monotonous day to day but looking at the game from a step back it is easy to see how fast the quality improves when a concentrated bug-fixing effort is applied. It definitely feels rewarding when you see someone playing the game and you don’t notice the same old bugs you are so used to seeing.
The biggest challenge for the gameplay programmers (and what I think will continue to be the biggest challenge on this project) is the laborious process of tuning the boss encounters. Often times our bosses don’t use a lot of shared code that we’ve developed for the majority of the AI and they require significant amounts of special one-off code. It does amount to some interesting and different behavior but also a lot more tweaking and bugs.
Unfortunately I can’t reveal any of our boss creatures that haven’t already been announced (only the Giant Squid has so far, I think). We’re just finishing up the final boss though, which is pretty hefty all in all. He’s got like 12 stages / modes! We almost had a heart attack when we saw the design… and those 12 stages were after a few had been cut due to lack of time.
Ah well, it will be cool for the player and that is what makes it worth it.