Six Ages Won’t be Out This Year, Progress Report

King of Dragon Pass spiritual successor Six Ages was announced without much fanfare around two years ago and since then hasn’t really made the news with big announcements of any sort, though development on it has been ongoing. With a blog post on the official website, designer David Dunham explained that the game unfortunately won’t be ready for prime time in 2016, but that progress is steady.

An excerpt on what’s going on, development-wise:

I am pretty sure of one thing: it will not be released this year, as I had originally hoped.

Other than that, I’m pleased with the progress. One important reason is that the budget needed to be significantly less than King of Dragon Pass, and even as development continues longer than I had planned, we’re still OK on costs. And game play is complete enough that you can play a complete game, so we can start improving that. And complete enough that we can tell a lot of things are working pretty well.

One reason that things are taking longer than my original plan is that as we developed the game, it became obvious that it would need more scenes and accompanying art than I had first thought. We now have 40% more scenes, and 59% more scene art, in fact!

More scenes means not only more art, but more time needed to write them, more time needed to code them in our scripting language, and more time needed to make sure that all branches are tested. As I’ve written before, we are done with the writing. We’ve also completed script coding. Testing is harder to measure (since some branches depend on external conditions or chance), but over 3/4 of scenes have had all branches exercised. (Our automated testing isn’t as thorough, though it adds another level of confidence.)