Hello everyone. Over the past months we have enjoyed a tremendous amount of progress toward completing the game. Several key milestones have marked some very satisfying leaps forward. Getting a build ready for the 2013 PAX Prime allowed us to showcase the first section of the game. If you haven’t seen it already, you can check it out in Alex Thomas’ “Let’s Play” video series.
To prepare for submitting a build to the IGF we focused on the first third of the game, taking the player past Skogr and all the way to Einartoft. The story returns to Vedrfell in the north and follows the varl caravan through Ridgehorn. To fully test and polish the game, we contracted with Sculpin QA, a Quality Assurance studio based in Nova Scotia. They were able to provide an immense amount of help finding bugs and identifying areas in need of polish. It ended up saving us a lot of time, and making the final result much better.
We finished our IGF submission build a week early, and proceeded directly toward content completion. We are on the cusp of being fully content and feature complete. Content complete means the entire story and all its variations is playable with final dialog and pacing from beginning to end. Feature complete means all major gameplay elements, player classes, AI classes, and user interfaces are in the game. Austin Wintory will be visiting the studio for several days next week to work with us to finalize the implementation of the music into the game.
We’ll be releasing more information about the game soon, so stay tuned! In the meantime take a look at The Banner Saga on the IGF page.
