Frayed Knights Development Update

The latest development update from Frayed Knights developer Jay Barnson is a comprehensive analysis of the game’s current alpha state along with some promising hints that its release isn’t too far off.

Well, Frayed Knights is not ready for release. Yet. Though the light at the end of the tunnel is getting a little brighter. It occurred to me the other day that that Frayed Knights is literally the most complex, detailed game I’ve ever worked on in my entire career. There’s one indie MMO I worked on that came close, but I only worked on pieces of that. But Twisted Metal? Jet Moto? Warhawk? Those were simple arcade-ish games designed to run inside of 2 megs of RAM (not including texture memory and level changes). Plus, they had a team of several developers, and a budget about 400x more than mine.

Making things worse, I’d developed some of the systems back in the early days of FK development to be WAY too complex and flexible. I’m not using half the capabilities I designed for it, and it has made things harder to develop (complexity = more work). Silly me. As much as I rail against (kitchen sink design) (throwing in everything but the kitchen sink), I have fallen into that trap myself. And now I have to figure out how to balance all that crap. Brilliant work, Jay.