Frayed Knights - Tool Time

An update on Frayed Knights aimed at the coders out there:

Time for another update on Frayed Knights, the “quick” and “easy” indie RPG that was somehow going to magically take only a few months of my spare time to complete. This update is going to be super-ultra-sexy. Which in this case means, “Totally boring unless you are a programming or design geek.” My apologies.
Abraham Lincoln reportedly said something along the lines of, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe.”

Click to expand...

More information.

Abraham Lincoln was a smart man!

And this is also why you, in a professional game production, *do not* start mass producing content before you are absolutely sure how the pipelines/work-flows function for every single major game-play feature. As tempting as it might be...

Usually you have a milestone where you must present a single level, polished to at least 90% shipping quality and including every major game feature - and produced with the tools that you are going to use for the rest of the production. It might be bad enough for a one-man production to have to rework all previous produced content, but imagine the pain if it had been a 100 man content team producing content with the wrong tools

Anyways, a really interesting update. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us!

(And btw: I'm doing the same mistake all the time with my own two-man hobby projects. Always underestimating the need for specialized tools. It's more fun to work on the actual game features )

Yes, this kind of thing is a nightmare, especially if you realize something you planned isn't going to work! Besides you know how good tools there are out there... but they all cost money.... so do you buy them and save 100's of hours.. or do you make them yourself and save 100's of dollars....

If time is money, then it's often cheaper to buy them, assuming they are just what you need.

Unfortunately, nothing is just what I need. A lot of my needs have evolved over time. Some of the basic tools - the level / mission editors, Blender, texture generators, etc. - have been in use for a long time. But something like an item editor - with my unique needs - is not something you can just grab off the shelf (though there are some other tools that could be adapted with a bit of coding, which I'm looking into).