Any chance you'll release the demo by year end?
Full demo? No. Combat demo? That's the goal but it's too early to say if we manage to hit it.
Let's say we release it in mid Dec. We'll need a month of closed beta testing (with 20+ players), maybe more, but let's say 4 weeks. We'll need a month of internal testing and tweaking before we can start the closed beta test. So we'll need to have everything in place and ready for playing in mid Oct, which means we have 2.5 months to get there. While we can cut some corners and add non-critical stuff later, it goes without saying that it's better to delay it to early 2019 than to release unplayable and unbalanced mess in 2018. First impressions and all that.
- The character and combat systems, including the AI and pathfinding should be ready in about 2 months, so we're right on schedule here.
- The item and dialogue editors are done.
- The level itself and the dialogues are done.
- The basic GUI is done but we still need the art pass, the main screen, and quite a few portraits for the enemies. I believe we can wrap it up in 2-3 months.
- The weapons are done (models and icons).
- The animations should be ready in 3 months (talking about the basic stuff here, no fancy death animations yet)
- The armor is still in very early stages. We thought that Joao would be able to handle it, he couldn't, so it went back to Ivan (the animator). It's too late to look for someone else now, so all we can do is hope and pray that he can handle both tasks (the armor and the animations) in the next 4 months as we can add them last minute (we have rough animations at the moment).
So it's definitely doable but it's not 100% yet.
