Horn of the Abyss Factory latest news – HotA team continues to work on the project

Author: Liso1 March 23, 2023 15 Comments

Post from forum.df2.ru, posted by Lazy/Donko (this is a machine translation from Russian):

The team continues to work on the project. There is no specific release date.

For a long time there was not a word from the team in my face, I feel the need to fill the information vacuum. Yes, at one point I said that updates before the release, I do not want to write more, but it seems I fell into the same trap in which once got Docent. It’s very hard being on the “graphical” side of development to evaluate progress on completely different things, especially the code. Making a pretty picture is an important task, but far from the only one, and by the hour it’s much easier to make a graphic than to translate an idea into a game on the technical side. At the end of last year I thought that if we decided not to release all third-party content besides the city itself, all the work could be completed with a reasonable speed by the release date of Heroes 3 (March 1), but this is my expectation did not correspond to reality, as well as the framework of the year and a half, which once unofficially called Docent.

Compared to how the development was organized 2 years ago, we have significantly stepped forward. Keeping accurate records of all tasks, even the smallest, and progress on them. For the upcoming release, the count of these individual tasks goes into the hundreds. We had an idea to show the percentage progress on the total number of these tasks, but in the end without specifics it won’t tell the waiting players much and will only give more room for speculation. Completion of a single code task can take a very long time, and 10 graphical tasks like “fix a pixel” will take half an hour, so even the available to us “percentages” of readiness will not reflect the actual situation.

At the moment the Factory is playable, all abilities and features are implemented and preliminary internal team testing is underway. The only unfinished elements of the city, the Creature Voice and the Mystery Map (puzzle grail map?), are literally being implemented as I write this post. The creation of maps for the campaign continues, the only difference being that now several maps are not only fully drawn, but also tested, having almost reached their final form. But the programmers of the team face a very huge task not only to create something new, but also to test, debug, find bugs and fix them (some seemingly small bug can easily turn out to be a rabbit hole, requiring search and make changes in large amounts of code, which in turn will require more changes and debugging). This is not a quick and very time-consuming phase with a horizon of work that simply cannot be evaluated until each specific problem has been worked on. The player will not even see all of this work in the game, as opposed to graphics, so if someone suddenly thinks that if you can not see, then you can not do, let him remember that then play the game in principle will not come out.

In addition, version 1.7 will be a kind of “big clean-up” for HotA. Many of the things in previous versions, which have already been implemented in a roundabout way or through the so-called “crutches” get a new, more correct implementation. And this concerns not only the code, but also the graphics (yes, some removed from the map editor “low-quality” content will return to the game in an updated quality. Yes, I’m talking about including the red tree sets). Even the dock creatures got a new voiceover. I will not estimate how much content besides the Factory itself and its Campaign will be in the release, but I would not expect anything spectacular, the original plan to devote 1.7 is the new city remains in force (the more plans for third-party content is constantly updated and revised). Absolutely everyone in the team is busy, our resources are not idle.

I also want to note that despite the extremely low activity of the team members in Vkontakte group, I periodically check all comments under old news postings, as well as in discussions like “questions for developers”. We are grateful to active community members who reply and help people with minor problems and quandaries. In addition to the Vkontakte group I also read the Heroescommunity and Acidcave forums. Even though I don’t write anything, I follow all of you biggrin.gif And some important things that I find on these resources reach the team.

Source:https://forum.df2.ru/index.php?s=00e23c8a9e7b491ed076aa51da8bdc7e&showtopic=37363&st=3860&p=784708&#entry784708