Eschalon: Book II Q&A Thread Expands

Basilisk Games’ Thomas Riegsecker has once again paid a visit to the official Eschalon: Book II Q&A thread to address three questions pertaining to crossbows, spell books, and development time allocation.

[AstralWanderer] BW, would you care to say how much time (as a percentage) is being spent on programming and how much on world development? (i.e. plot, NPCs, dialogues, area design). As someone who felt Book 1 was rather too short, I would be interested to know if the work balance is changing, given that there is a previous game base to build upon.

We spent far more time programming Book II than we originally planned. Features like increased video resolution, improved spell book, alchemy mixer, journal, combat modes and game challenges took more time to implement than we planned on, which pushed back our estimated release date. Now we spend about 90% of our time on content creation, with 10% devoted to bug fixes. The engine is essentially ‘feature complete’ except for a few very small things that need to be turned on still.

Content will continue to be piled on until the very last minute that we start selling the game (and probably more content will be added in the first few patches). Book II is definitely larger than Book I, and more challenging.