Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror Update #7

A new development update for Spiderweb Software’s upcoming cRPG Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror has gone up on Kickstarter. The update brings us up to speed with the game’s development, talks a bit about backer rewards, and tells us what’s next for the project. Check it out:

Here is the first monthly update for Queen’s Wish development! We’ve been hard at work on the new game, and it is moving along.

Spiderweb games are developed in three phases. First, we work on the game engine and system. This takes 3-5 months, depending on how much of the game is new. In Queen’s Wish, almost everything is new.

Then we write the game world, which is about six months. Then 2-3 months of porting to Windows and testing. Then we ship! (And then move on to the ports to mobile.)

What We Did Last Month

We are still grinding our way through the first phase: the main engine.

On the technical side, we spent a while porting our code to a new, powerful game engine called SDL. In this case, the engine is the layer between my game and the computer itself. The game engine we used before was way out of date. This engine is completely current and should support lots of cool stuff, like 64-bit Windows and mouse wheel input.

Then we worked on making the game playable. This involves a million things. Training window. Inventory window. Fully fleshed out combat code. We are trying to get a basically playable game, so that I can see how much of the stuff I’ve been assembling in my brain for the last two years actually works.

Finally, I scripted the statistics for all of the creatures, abilities, and items. This is tons of painstaking work and takes forever, but the game is now full of critters to fight and treasures to look for.

Rewards

We have sent out messages to the design assistants, and we’re getting some great stuff back from them. There are some terrific ideas in there, and I’m really excited.

If you got a signed, singed Certificate of Absolution, watch out for the survey asking for your name, address, and other info. We’ll be sending it out soon.

What Is Next

The game isn’t fully playable in a near-final sense yet, but it’s getting there. By the time the next update is out, we should be able to have full combats, and a lot of the world system stuff (like dressing up your fort, mining resources, and wandering the outdoors) should be in.

It’s a good start, but we have a long way to go. It can be demoralizing when I sit down in the morning and look at the To Do list. Then I pick the quickest job to do, do that, and move on to the next job. We’ll get there eventually.

And that’s where we’re at. See you next month!

– Jeff Vogel