Frayed Knights II: The Khan of Wrath Development Blog

Jay Barnson has published a new blog post on the development of Frayed Knights II: The Khan of Wrath in which he explains in what ways the work he has done upfront to set up the sequel’s engine framework is paying off and it what ways it isn’t. Here’s an excerpt:

But as I’m trying to divide my time equally now between code and content (particularly because I can get help on the content side, if I don’t leave them hanging), it’s extremely nice to have all that up-front work done and working. For a lot of the basics of putting together the interactivity of a level, it feels like I’m working with a higher-level toolkit. Where something as simple as a basic door used to take me 2-5 minutes to set up and place in FK1 even when I got the process down pat and in a rhythm, it’s now a matter of about fifteen seconds or so. More complex behaviors take a little longer, but still less than they used to.

This really makes designing environments much less of a chore. In theory (and, so far, in practice as well) what it comes down to is that I get to spend my time focused on more interesting stuff. Complex interactions or unique one-off behaviors. That’s what I love. And hopefully there’ll be more payoffs when we’re getting to the balancing / testing / fixing stage.

I love it when a plan comes together.

I love it when a game comes together. I should have been far better about this from the get-go, because rapid iteration from a playable prototype is really important. But it’s really cool seeing a whole bunch of these pieces finally coming together, working well together (mostly), and although we’re still dealing with a lot of stand-in visuals and stuff. being able to see a game there. This is different from September’s demo, because there were a lot of things we simply had to turn off because we ran out of time and they weren’t working right, or because it would have caused a lot of player confusion.