The Production Blog of Sword 'N' Board
 
It's a strange thing with Sword 'N' Board. It was largely to be a learning experience, to teach me something that I wanted to know to try and make the real game that I had in mind, and also give me something more for my resume to help me stand up. 

Never did I think I would end up getting the job I wanted before the game was even in it's Beta phases. 

As you can imagine now a lot of my time is spent doing real game development stuff for my daily job and then trying to fit what I can for the game within that time on the side of the more important things that help pay the bills. 

There is good news and bad news. The good news is, I'm 100% certain that Sword 'N' Board will be finished for people to play, the bad news being that I don't really know when that will be. 

I set the original release date for one reason, and that was to limit myself to 6 months for the project. I didn't want to spend any longer on the game than a 6 month production cycle because 1.) I was going to be releasing it for free, and spending a year on a free game seemed a bit much, and 2.) I didn't want to have to wait a year to have something great on my portfolio so I could start applying for better jobs. 

However, now that I have the job that I've always wanted, the reasons for completing the game are different now...

Now, I want to finish the game because It's not really in me to put this much time and effort into something and not see it completed, and also because... I really just want to play it!

I started this and saw a lot of things in modern adventure games, and dungeon crawlers that I really thought I could improve on, that I STILL think I can improve on and I want to make good on those ideas and see what I can do with them. 

Lately I've been increasingly concerned with that looming release date as it slowly draws nearer, and I realized something.

Can I make the deadline? Sure I could. Would the game be any good? Sure, for about the first 30 minutes... and then anything after that would have been a thrown together mess that was tossed together in a hurried panic to fulfill a release date that I set upon myself long ago with different circumstances in place. 

To spend the time, and care that I have put into Sword 'N' Board, in doing everything I could to make it something more than just a "Zelda Clone" only to throw it together in the 9th hour and watch it become a pale shadow of what it could have been, I think would be heart breaking. 

So, right now I am not sure when it is going to be released. Is it going to take me the next year to finish? Absolutely not. But I do know that it's not going to be finished in just a few weeks time. 

I'm going to take whatever time I need with the game, to make it as good as it can possibly be. So when I look back on it, I can be proud of what I did here. 



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