The actual implementation won't be finished until about Thursday most likely, but I'm going to be shifting majorly into more full-testing mode even prior to then. As well as working on the attack animations and getting those wired up so that I'll be comfortable doing a video of the game, heh.
This is a very exciting milestone, because it means that now -- once Keith finishes his implementation, which of course logically always lags after specs being written (it's a pipeline, after all) -- we'll be able to shift into refinement, refactoring, bugfixing, enhancing, balancing, testing, etc. We've been doing some of that the whole way, of course, but this will really let us go into that full-out.
I want to have about two weeks of time with just myself on that sort of testing so that we can get all the main things nailed down, and then we'll start bringing in alpha players. Then about two months, give or take slightly, of testing with more players.
We might add a feature here or there, particularly small stuff that fits into the existing framework, and we will certainly add some more pure-content things like disease names (which require very little data and absolutely no art or programming), but in terms of the main structure of the game the goal was to get that complete so that it can actually be played as it was intended.
All in all at the moment we have:
- 104 technologies on the main tech tree
- 17 unique social progress categories
- 8 different categories of procedurally-generated "market items," which are kind of a tech tree of their own.
- 118 underground buildings, most of which are AI-only alien-specific (only 3 are not).
- 200 surface city buildings overall, with 107 of those being human-only and 93 being AI-only.
- A further 6 "multi-racial" buildings that are used for 11 of the races in AI-only circumstances, and skinned to match the race's theme.
- 42 leaders overall, split across the 14 races (3 each).
- A semi-procedural disease model.
- Diplomacy
- Translations of 14 alien races.
- 5 ways to "dominate" a race other than militarily (those being diplomacy, economy, intellectual, entertainment, and espionage).
- Thieves, spies, blockades, and a variety of other things.
- Straightforward air, sea, land, and ranged combat -- but no units!
- 11 overall "wonders" that are unrelated to special victory conditions, and then a further 7 wonders that are exclusively for specific victory conditions (the other 11 wonders may be required for various victory conditions but also have functions outside of those victory conditions).
- 9 different "natural wonders" for you to encounter in the world via exploration. These we likely will add more of, but probably late in the process.
- 17 different "underground monsters."
- Oh yeah, there are 49 different special things you can get various races to do. We called the system "superpowers" under the hood, but some of them are mundane and some of them are definitely superpowers. Some of these are shared by many races, others are limited to just a single race.
- The AI is a really extensible system (internally, by us) that is also multi-threaded per AI race, all running in parallel.
- Pollution is modeled.
- Also crime, woundings in battle, accidents, taxes, waste disposal, body disposal or burial, food/water/meal production, power production, etc. Most of those systems are very simple, but there are a lot of them all intermingling so that's really good!
- 33 unique resources are in the game, and have a variety of special effects, as well as resource-user buildings that let you augment adjacent buildings. Or you can sell the resources.
- The terraforming thing is in there, with 3 unique terrain types per race except for the flying and underwater ones (which have none), and the Acutians, which happen to have 4. This is the method for managing climatology, aka the atmospheric composition.
Art-wise:
- All of the terrain art is 100% complete.
- Some of the particle effects are complete.
- All of the soldier art for combat animations is complete, but the animations themselves are not.
- The various vehicle art is a mixture of levels of complete, but all of it is modeled.
- 96 out of the 104 tech tree icons are complete.
- 75 out of the 118 underground building images are complete.
- None of the underground monsters have official art yet, but the stand-in stuff is clear for now (just not too pretty).
- 87 out of 107 human buildings are completely done (although 3 more are almost done except for some last tuning).
- 18 out of the 66 surface multi-racial buildings are done.
- 26 out of the 94 surface alien buildings are done.
- 35 out of 42 of the alien leader portraits are done.
- 6 out of the 17 social progress images are complete.
- the gui for the tech tree and social progress screens are pretty much complete.
- the gui for the other subscreens are semi-done, but have a lot of visual touching-up that is needed in various parts.
- the gui for the top of the main screen is pretty much done, pending any last shifts.
- the gui for the bottom of the main screen is about 70% done, and still needs some shifts that we just haven't made a priority yet.
- the lobby gui is really kind of a joke right now, because we just implemented it as roughly as we could for our own testing. so that's one more thing prior to larger-scale testing, not that it's a big part of the game (but it's an important first impression).
Overall the specs that I wrote up are currently 215 pages, or 85,135 words. That's not really including much in the way of data definitions, which fills many code files and spreadsheets and xml files and flat files, as the case warrants. The code itself is large and robust, and though it's not fully optimized yet it already runs very pleasingly smoothly. So far we have managed to keep between-turn times sub-second on my machine, although that won't always be the case I imagine. Still, substantial late-game slowdown is not something we expect to be a huge thing given the way this is design. We hate that slowdown as much as you. In fact, I might hate it more than you, depending on how you are.
Ah... yeah. So, it's coming along very well, and I'm super pleased to be at this point. It's a huge game, and there is still a lot for us to do in terms of bringing it to 1.0 status, but it's looking really good so far.