Timberloo wrote:The project not being finished? The inevitable two year long, "We're still alive!" news-updating phase followed by the, "Unfortunately, I'm finally pulling the plug on Allacrost. It would've been the best RPG ever, but the team just flaked on me" conclusion?
The switch to prerendered 3D when you can't get good 2D artists, followed by a switch to lowpoly 3D when the 3D artists aren't producing . . . .
The art page being 95% anime sketches and 5% actual game assets?
So much to look forward to! I'm excited!
Rimpoche!!!
Your criticism is totally fair. Although I do think you could have stated it in a less vulgar manner, there's nothing wrong with what you said. I'll spare one of my famous incredibly verbose posts and just summarize up the important points I want to make.
- The reason there haven't been any updates on the site lately is because I'd rather be working on something else. My number 1 man (Balthazar) has been out for some time now and it's a hassle for me to try to keep the site up-to-date while still working on the code.
- Realize that 100% of the people working on this game do it in their spare time, for fun. If I could dedicate 40 or 60 hours a week to Allacrost, I would love it. But that doesn't pay the bills, and it doesn't help me pass my classes either. I spend what time I can afford on Allacrost.
- Also realize that the majority of here (especially myself) have never made a game before and lack the general experience. That first year or so was basically just a learning phase for a lot of us (although we didn't know it at the time).
- I doubt that the entire staff is just going to 'flake out' one day. Some people may leave because other commitments pop up in their lives, and that's fine. I will continue to work on Allacrost until its completed or until I die. Hopefully the former will come first.
- We actually have been wanting to get out new screenshots and a demo for some time now, but once the fall semester started people got seriously bogged down and production slowed considerably.

Not much we can do about that though! The code is making good progress these days though, as you can see by our CVS respository (commits made every 2-3 days on average).
- Final point:
there is no one more disappointed with the slow progress of Allacrost than myself. Honestly, I had no idea how much work it was going to be, and how it was going to be even harder to find the time to do that work. But there's no point in looking back at the past and being full of regret. We just have to keep on truckin' and moving forward.
And in response to Jetryl's very insightful post.
- I know Wesnoth and TMW use different development models than we do, especially with regards to keeping things public/private. I think things have been working out well for us so far though. The main reason I want to keep some things in private discussion is because I don't want to spoil the story for people (which we have always placed a very heavy emphasis on, since this is an RPG).
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Maybe we can experiment with things like giving forum members read-only access to some of the staff forums (art, music, code), but I have a feeling they'll just want to post about what they read there in other public forums, and then we have a mess because we'll have "too much" input into every design decision, and it would slow the whole process down.
- One of the major differences between Wesnoth and Allacrost is our release models. I would like Allacrost to look and feel like a quality game from the first moment someone plays it. Wesnoth certainly is a quality game now, but if you look at some of the first releases it.....well it looks like crap.

I like our release model though, and our modular release concept will hopefully put it all together.
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Final point: I agree with releasing a tech demo (its currently #2 on the team's goal list. #1 is releasing new screenshots). When we released our first screenshots we got a lot of criticism and crap from people because they didn't look that great. We
did work our asses off for a couple weeks to get those out, and the lesson we learned was don't rush something if it means a considerable degrade in quality. Anyway, all the code is there to support awesome screenshots, so all we need is the art now.
Okay, enough blabbing from me.
