A Delve into the Development #1 – The Stages of Development

Hey again! I’m going to try and make one post per week, but I don’t know if I’ll keep to a set schedule.

Starting off, I’m going to go talk about the ‘stages of development’ within Fabrication, with this blog post focusing on what ‘main content’ is! I’d like to make a really important update, too. As of today, Fabrication is 40% main content complete.

What is ‘main content’, you ask? Well, main content includes the following:

• The areas of the game
• The field gameplay of the game
• The story of the game
• Any additional graphics for the game (such as facial expressions or icons to go with the progression of the story)

Ever since I started development of Fabrication nearly a year ago (mid-late July 2018), I wanted to split development into sections and be more concise. ‘Main content’ covers the very basics of the game: simple story progression with finished areas and cutscenes right from the start to finish. Because this is a story focused RPG game, it is quite important. In fact, I’ve always wanted to do it first since it takes the longest – and I find that making additional content like sidequests and foreshadowing scenes more interesting.

I actually completed the story plan of Fabrication at 28th September 2018. There’s going to be 10 chapters in Fabrication, compared to White Pearl’s extensive 16(!) chapters. However, the focus is more on quality rather than quantity now. The development time for the chapters so far has been as follows:
(You can view updates here: https://twitter.com/ottrea/status/1129730085152526336)

• Chapter 1: July 2018 – August 2018
• Chapter 2: September 2018 – February 2019
• Chapter 3: February 2019 – March 2019
• Chapter 4: April 2019 – May 2019

You might be wondering: ‘what’s up with the erratic development times?’ Well, development of this game is more of a ‘hobby’ now, no matter how seriously I take it… If I need any additional art or money for the game, I’m going shift focus to working for it, so that makes everything longer. It usually only takes a month for a chapter to be completed if I’m working on it full time every day. But that’s not very healthy…

So, taking this erratic workflow in mind, don’t be surprised to see weird jumps in timeframes. But, the more I develop in the ‘main content’ section, the easier it gets to create the rest of the game: because all of the gameplay is available. I’ve also developed unique gameplay sequences within the chapters too, like the bomb system, sneaking system… You will see when you get to play it in 2098!