DEV DIARY #9: NEW YEAR, NEW MILESTONE
After celebrating the Alpha, 2020 brings us to a next step in development – Content Complete.
Hello everyone and Happy 2020!
Last year ended with a bang for us, as you may recall from our last update, the game is now in Alpha which is a very big milestone for the team. After celebrating, a large part of Alpha is to scope the remaining work into manageable pieces and bring them to the next step in development – Content Complete.
At this specific point in development, we are beginning to lock down certain features and quests. This means after extensive internal and external review, the feature or quest is considered complete and all work on the content is finished. This doesn’t mean the feature or quest is done however, as it still needs to be fully tested and reviewed for problems and bugs. We would of course love to tell you everything we’ve already locked down, but hey, spoilers.
What we can tell you is that much of the one-handed melee attack animations have been updated and locked, including animations for knives and lead pipes, the VFX team has finalized the telekinesis effects for the Mentalism Discipline, and the Environment Art team has wrapped set dressing of interior spaces in the domain of the Baron of Aurora.
For the first part of the year we are pushing toward “Content Complete”, meaning all content of the game is final and bug-fixing and polish become the priorities. AI engineers are populating the levels with different types of pedestrians and encounters, Environment artists are dressing side-quest spaces, Lighting and animation have their eyes on the conversations with NPCs, making sure they are well lit and fit well with the surrounding environment, and the narrative and quest design teams are hard at work adding some additional content and surprises.
Even when a blizzard struck Seattle earlier this month, that didn’t stop the snowed-in team from building content for the game. Inspiration can come from one’s surroundings, so much of the work around that time came from very important sources:
Thanks for reading the update, we will be back in February with another update!
The Bloodlines 2 Team