With the goal of shipping Chapter 1, there was a lot of progress all over the game in February.
- 4 Missions and 1 Cutscene location are now at the "final polish" stage. We also finished the first pass on the Player Hub area and another central Cutscene location.
- We have finished a first complete pass of all the narrative elements and dialog for a couple missions in Chapter 1. Late last month we started implementing those elements in Mission 1. I got to play through some initial work on Friday before I left.
- All of the leads took the time to make our 4th story pass through the rest of the game to adjust bits that needed to move around. We also need to identify all the potential spots for backer NPCs to fit in. These are always very dense 3+ hour meetings for each chapter. In this latest pass we were able to streamline a number of bulky storylines that were bogging down the narrative and not serving the gameplay. We got through Chapters 2-5. Chapter 6 will be on Tuesday this week.
- Wireframing continues to come along nicely. All the User Interface screens that are unlocked during Chapter 1 are laid out. Our art team will be working with the developers to start implementing them on Monday.
- The Human Male and 3 different job outfits are complete, so we can finally start rigging and initial animations. This is the one area that I feel we're the most behind on, but this effort has now been moved to the forefront, and I'm looking forward to having the real units in the game instead of our placeholders.
- Our Art Director started working on more of the key visual effects for the game, so we can get the complete sense of how final combat will look.
- The development team implemented the save system, game flow for starting a new game and getting into each mission, while laying all the ground work for upcoming user interface functionality.
