Eschalon: Book II Production Started

While no official announcement is out, Basilisk Games notes on its forum it has started work on Eschalon: Book II.

We have just started work on Book II, but we have not officially announced anything.

Thanks for your support!

This means most patching is done and probably that no expansion is forthcoming. One of the forum users asked about possible modding, but:

The biggest problem is that Book I was not designed to be very moddable. We are t planning on making Book II more easily accessible in that regard. There is just no way to offer up mod tools for Book I without massive amounts of reworking to the engine, and most people would rather see that effort go into Book II.

You are right- Book I was just not large enough. Being our first game, it was hard to tell just how big was “big enough”. The game was a little short, but we will correct that with Book II.

As for the tools used for Book I- they are not inadequate by any means, but since we made them for ourselves they lack documentation and so are nearly impossible for outsiders to use. Our scripting system is proprietary, the map editor has about 20 undocumented keystrokes, most variables are abbreviated and would not be clear to the end user, and the editor layout is optimized for our 1920×1200 monitors which is generally larger than most people at home have. So, we have the tools but they are not suitable for public release.