In previous updates, we mentioned we would update the community on the progress of the Shiryo game (Leading to the Alpha Test phase) — once we conducted our most recent meeting with the Game Development team.
As promised, we’re here to deliver on that.
This update will provide insight into the remaining tasks. We can not provide exact dates for the Alpha Test Phase, but we can continue to do what we have with our weekly updates and provide transparency in our developments.
We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from our community since beginning our weekly updates — which we’re very grateful for.
Still, we are constantly mindful of the anticipation for the Alpha Test Phase and how much time has passed since our initial projections.
Together the Shiryo Team and our community have witnessed the game expand and develop significantly beyond our initial concepts. This reason alone would naturally lead to extensions — which have been necessary in order to produce a game that can compete with the standards available today with a team of our size.
More so than the above, we’ve encountered many obstacles in our journey that we’ve shared with the Wolfpack. You’ve been able to witness our wins and all of our struggles.
For those who have supported us all throughout — thank you.
We said we would still be developing throughout the bear market and we are still here, our highs and lows have only made us more experienced and capable — and we look forward to delivering you the best game we can.
Game Development Tasks
Current ‘obstacles’
Right now we don’t appear to have any obstacles as far as bugs or tasks needing more skill, our team is quite capable of working through the objectives we have.
The largest challenge is how attention needs to be divided across various tasks, particularly given that our lead game developer Rick needs oversight across multiple areas and can’t always dedicate full time to coding (his key strength).
We’ve seen how this can affect our rate of development when issues come up such as when our servers failed back in April, which required a lot of Rick’s direct attention;
https://medium.com/@shiryo/weekly-shiryo-update-from-the-lead-game-dev-6-6c864aa8ea64
Our game development team members all have diverse sets of skills, although our team’s size is much smaller than a typical game development team.
Given this, we simply try to be as mindful as we can about where we allocate our resources at different stages of development — and are actively on the look for capable staff to alleviate this.
User Interface (Lobby system)
This area of the project is near full completion. It contains all the necessary functionality — and from a design perspective we’re largely satisfied with where it’s at, which you can see in last week’s update here;
https://medium.com/@shiryo/weekly-update-from-the-shiryo-team-19-a1175e66fdef
The sounds still need to be finalized for the UI which is a fairly ‘easy’ task for our sound engineer to work through.
Once complete, the UI will need to be coded and made operable for the Alpha Test which will take a few weeks itself.
We’re looking to prioritize this aspect so it’s blocked off and completed. After which, coding priority will be placed on the ability and spell animation systems.
Animations for the game.
Around 70% of the ability animations required for the Alpha Test Phase have been completed. Completing the full set is estimated to be merely a few weeks away.
Once each animation is completed it also needs to have the right sounds, then each complete asset can be coded into the game. We’re already making great progress in our sounds, which you may recall from last week’s update here;
https://medium.com/@shiryo/weekly-update-from-the-shiryo-team-19-a1175e66fdef
Sounds.
Around 40 animation abilities need sounds, our UI needs sounds and our game’s background music needs finalizing. We’re making rapid progress through our animation sounds, there is simply a large volume to be completed. Our UI sounds are expected to be a very quick task. Our games’ music will be the most complex task, however, there isn’t much volume of work.
Coding
Our ability system and ‘spell’ animation systems are still being actively worked through, these were areas which our assistant developer Tomat was working on with Rick. Unfortunately, as Tomat had left our team this had slowed this area of the game’s development (whilst Rick had been focusing on bringing up other areas).
Significant work has been completed in this area and the good news is – progress in the former provides progress in the latter.
To quote from a previous article, the ability and spell animation systems are related;
“The spell system is a derivative of the ability system, it’s fed forward, utilizing the same “generalized and scalable” codebase for efficiency and performance optimization. This does result in the same exceptions that too need to be designed, individually programmed, tested, refined….. Etc”
There are a few weeks worth of work remaining on this, however, it’s not an issue that can be worked on simultaneously with other tasks.
AWS + Portal
Our Portal developer is well at work, which you can see our latest update on the Portals development here;
https://medium.com/@shiryo/weekly-update-from-the-shiryo-team-17-4f7a1688f603
As it currently stands, our portal developer has around a month’s worth of tasks ahead of him that he’s able to work through. There will come a point when Ricks will be required to work directly with him, that time should coincide fairly well with our priorities to finish coding for the UI first, then the ability and animation systems, and finally finishing the portal.
