With regards to Divinity II, there’s been a lot of progress since the last time I gave this update.
Our sound/art/animation departments are continuing to polish and get the final pieces of content in before they’ll be heading into an extensive post-production phase. A couple of things were fun to see – for a long time we’ve had a long list of areas and dungeons that were fairly empty as they weren’t populated with all kinds of sceneries and items. Now that these regions are getting the “placement” treatment, the world is really coming alive and you also start seeing all the more advanced graphical features being used by the artists. When looking at how some of those levels come together, you start getting the feeling of – “hey, this really is a game”. It’s all good and well knowing that RPG world building consists of placing layer upon layer of content, but actually seeing all those layers come together makes you feel a bit more confident in what you’ve been doing all along.
The same goes for everything which is coding related. For a long time, our programmers have been making system upon system upon system. One system for boosting items, another system for animating dialogs, another system for determining what will happen when you walk into a particular trigger etc… I think the number of gameplay features alone runs in the four digit numbers. Once these systems are finished people tend to forget about them until the content teams start actually using them to do their thing. That typically ends up in the system being revisited because this thing isn’t possible, or that was forgotten, but as more and more of these systems become operational, the feeling of “hey, this really is a game” increases dramatically.
