Elewyn
22-06-2004, 09:17
i think this post doesn't need no my comments...
sent by Frank Fay 17-06-2004 22:53 in what nations do you wanna play? (http://forum.sunflowers.de/showthread.php?s=&threadid=354) thread.
Okay folks,
i will try to give you a short update what is currently going on and why we dont post much since a time.
The reason is I guess obvious, we are busy... But I think you deserve now to know a bit more why.
Currently BSS is working on the last Alpha candidate for EA ... the mysterious milestone I spoke about :-) We are in final stages for submitting the candidate to EA on Monday. For those you dont know what Alpha is, it is the complete game with all features working.
For this milestone we had to shift a tramendous ammount of work and still working on it. You can imagine, only in an ideal world everything works smooth...not so in gamedevelopment. Therefore we run under some time constraints. I had to go to Sofia for about 2 months, with a short break for E3. BSS works through weekends since a long time. National holiday? Not for them and me :-( But hey, i dont want to complain...because we see the end of the tunnel...
BSS is implementing the last features and art. Biggest missing feature is the tutorial, which will help you to get into game later but it is almost done. The rest is minor but the sum of it, makes it. One mistake and we are basically screwed. Therefore Frujin is taking care of the game, that it wont break because of the late implemented stuff. And the team works hard on the assetts, which are code, art and sound. Some of the coders started to kill bugs and optimizing the code.
But that's not all. We had to pull off a sheer ammount of text, about 200.000 words had to be written, proofread, implemented, tested. Besides that, the voices had to be recorded. 16 actors over 5 days recording, 6 days postproduction with more than 8000 audio files. Uwe, our localisation manager and me were for some days in London to oversee the recordings. The next audios are the Gérman and French voices. The localisation into other languages is well under way. Also we have our first manual draft, which is quite nice though.
Our marketing works currently on the packaging and the marketing campaign. I saw some really nice stuff....
I also wanted to appologize for the "weak" updates the past few weeks. That happened because all resources at BSS and me were too busy to give them art, e.g the animated gifs or the unit renderings and the texts for the units or any other text. My colleagues plead us but we couldn't :-( However that will change, I promise..
You can imagine there is a lot of pressure on BSS, me and SF but we will manage and when that big burden is out of the way, you will see more from us. Then the game is in testing and our and EAs QA will help to eliminate the bugs, which BSS hasn't found and to make sure it goes on shelves polished and bugfree.
I can only hope this helps to shed some light on our silence...
The exact link to the post (http://forum.sunflowers.de/showthread.php?s=&postid=37597#post37597)
sent by Frank Fay 17-06-2004 22:53 in what nations do you wanna play? (http://forum.sunflowers.de/showthread.php?s=&threadid=354) thread.
Okay folks,
i will try to give you a short update what is currently going on and why we dont post much since a time.
The reason is I guess obvious, we are busy... But I think you deserve now to know a bit more why.
Currently BSS is working on the last Alpha candidate for EA ... the mysterious milestone I spoke about :-) We are in final stages for submitting the candidate to EA on Monday. For those you dont know what Alpha is, it is the complete game with all features working.
For this milestone we had to shift a tramendous ammount of work and still working on it. You can imagine, only in an ideal world everything works smooth...not so in gamedevelopment. Therefore we run under some time constraints. I had to go to Sofia for about 2 months, with a short break for E3. BSS works through weekends since a long time. National holiday? Not for them and me :-( But hey, i dont want to complain...because we see the end of the tunnel...
BSS is implementing the last features and art. Biggest missing feature is the tutorial, which will help you to get into game later but it is almost done. The rest is minor but the sum of it, makes it. One mistake and we are basically screwed. Therefore Frujin is taking care of the game, that it wont break because of the late implemented stuff. And the team works hard on the assetts, which are code, art and sound. Some of the coders started to kill bugs and optimizing the code.
But that's not all. We had to pull off a sheer ammount of text, about 200.000 words had to be written, proofread, implemented, tested. Besides that, the voices had to be recorded. 16 actors over 5 days recording, 6 days postproduction with more than 8000 audio files. Uwe, our localisation manager and me were for some days in London to oversee the recordings. The next audios are the Gérman and French voices. The localisation into other languages is well under way. Also we have our first manual draft, which is quite nice though.
Our marketing works currently on the packaging and the marketing campaign. I saw some really nice stuff....
I also wanted to appologize for the "weak" updates the past few weeks. That happened because all resources at BSS and me were too busy to give them art, e.g the animated gifs or the unit renderings and the texts for the units or any other text. My colleagues plead us but we couldn't :-( However that will change, I promise..
You can imagine there is a lot of pressure on BSS, me and SF but we will manage and when that big burden is out of the way, you will see more from us. Then the game is in testing and our and EAs QA will help to eliminate the bugs, which BSS hasn't found and to make sure it goes on shelves polished and bugfree.
I can only hope this helps to shed some light on our silence...
The exact link to the post (http://forum.sunflowers.de/showthread.php?s=&postid=37597#post37597)