Development Schedule

Design and concept, paper prototyping

  3 months (2 part-time team members)   Starter asset and tool acquisition   Completed game design document   Detailed mechanics plan   Initial concept art   Initial scope decisions   Public brief drafted   Book structure “finalized”    

Kickstarter build-out

(roughly in order of occurrence)   3-6 months (4 part-time team members)   Novel finished and published.   Comprehensive asset and tool acquisition.   Parallel projects and products in Guardians Universe showcased.   Clean story and theme copy.   Three primary succinct, historical, and biblical connections identified and briefed.   Three primary industry references identified and briefed.   (30) Screenshots of environments and 3D models.   10-second video of environments.   Core team members assembled and bio profiles posted.   (3) 10-second videos of gameplay mechanics.   Weekly (monthly?) Blog posts about progress.   60-second promotional trailer.   2-minute gameplay trailer.    

Kickstarter funded development

  6-9 months (4 full time, 4 part-time team members)   Full gameplay mechanic prototyping.   Map complete.   At least 10 primary buildings with interiors complete   At least 20 exterior-only buildings built.   Full range of textures assembled for further build construction   1 cycle of play is completely built.   Single guardian modeled and animated.   Dialog recorded and animated for 1 cycle.   Single speaking-part-character (Anne) fully modeled and animated.   Dialog recorded and animated for 1 cycle.   God mode user interface built.   Spiritual warfare battle area built (one demo level).   10 non-speaking NPCs fully modeled and animated.   The base cinematic score finished (no procedurally-generated changes.)   The battle score is finished.   20 sound effects implemented.   10 NPC barks implemented.   10 Player barks implemented.   Nephesh fully modeled in 3D. (Static. No animation or procedural changes.)   FULL VERTICAL SLICE.    

Full development

  36 months (team jumps to 10 full-time, then quickly grows to 50+)   First 12 months create first full prototype.   Successive prototypes iterate every six months, testing balance, quality, and fun until Early Access release is ready.   48 cycles of play.   All assets created and implemented.   30-month cutoff for features that will be a bridge too far.   The last six-month cycle is dedicated to polishing, balancing, and tuning existing features and assets.    

Early Access release

  12 months (50-80 member team).   Focus on balance, fun, replayability, variability, and polish.   Heavy community engagement.   Virtual production of short films, using created game assets.   Build out features that mitigate early access shortcomings as noted by the community.   Fix or remove elements that are not causing the desired player experience.   Six-month cutoff for which changes are still going to be made, with focus shifting further to robust testing and fixing. TIMELINE MAY SLIP HERE, IF POOR OUTCOME IS PROJECTED   Last three months of Early Access focus shifts to removing things that are still not close to being fixed.    

Beta release, testing

3 Months.   Playtesting.   Discover and fix bugs.   TIMELINE SHOULDN’T NEED TO SLIP HERE, BUT WILL IF IT NEEDS TO. A FINISHED GAME WITH NO BUGS WILL SHIP.   Launch    

Post Launch

1 Month -until Complete. THERE WILL BE BUGS. DESPITE OUR BEST EFFORTS. Fix bugs.    

Possible feature bloat mitigation

  Recognizing that the biggest risks to the schedule are feature bloat and scope creep, here are examples of ways that can be combated or the schedule made more realistic.:   Guardian angels could be limited to one that is controlled, with others being elements of story and world, or even completely limited to only one in the entire setting. If this path is chosen, scope will be much more limited.   “Speaking part” NPCs could be limited to 10 pivotal characters. The scope of the story, mechanics complexity, gameplay testing level-of-effort, and game balancing difficulty will all be greatly reduced with fewer speaking-part characters.   “Non-speaking-part” NPCs could be limited to 100, or even 50, with a sparsely-populated village providing a representative sample of the actual population. Choosing this path will reduce the scope of creating procedurally generated or repetitive models and barks, balancing overlapping daily pathing, and/or behavior rules.   Buildings/locations can be limited to as few as 10 or 20 that are enterable, greatly reducing the amount of interior modeling and programming needed.   The physical size of the world can be reduced and/or compartmentalized, reducing the open-world exploration to a small area and relegating the rest of the world to limited set-pieces that can be seen and not traversed. Choosing this route will reduce the tech requirements to run the game and greatly reduce the amount of level design and terrain implementation necessary.   “God Mode” observation could be limited to static information panels with 3D models of characters, as opposed to traversing the world to find them. This would reduce the feeling of omniscience of God, but may be more efficient for the player, and would certainly mitigate the difficulties of implementing a non-colliding player viewpoint in the world.   Nephesh animation could be simplified or removed. Animating a procedurally-generated image of the human soul would be a major triumph, but may carry a high level of development effort. An experienced animator will be able to assess the development scope of this task.   Putting the human soul on a standard map instead of a procedurally generated 3D model would eliminate much of the bespoke aesthetic and nuance, but greatly reduce the technical level of effort needed to implement a visible Nephesh.   Creating either a single universal or limited set of battle maps would likely be a much lower level of effort than procedurally generating them, however, it would reduce replayability and make the game more limited.   Simplify spiritual warfare. This could easily become a rabbit hole we never crawl out of, but will be a core feature of the game and should be as good as we can reasonably make it, even at the cost of a whole year of development.   Some or all dialog could be purchased voiceover packs of stock characters. This technology may be good enough for NPCs, especially non-speaking-part character barks, and almost certainly will not be good enough for any character that has a lip-sync animation rig.