So, it's been about a week since my last update; and I had a good Memorial day weekend with my wife and friends.

I am fully moved out of the Eastworks office; a place where I spent the better part of 2013 building Revel Immortal.

The final decision to move my development back home came from a few sources:

1. The house, and all homeownership demands was languishing without me.
2. I was spending an absurd amount of time working; about 80 hours a week.
3. The high-intensity period of developing for Revel, is (should be) over; a lot has been figured out, and paths have been blazed.
4. It will save me a good bit of money which right now could be better spent on assets/content.

My tradeoffs of course; is that working from home requires a whole different kind of dicipline; so-far i've been doing 'OK' at it.

The most useful aspect has been that, after doing a good bit of work on Revel, I can get something done around the house; where before it would have meant leaving the office and driving home and back, which was not desirable.

Does this mean less focus on development on average? probably. But for my life as a whole it is likely a net positive at this current stage.


So what is being done on Revel Immortal?

Excellent question; so first of all, the project has been branched; and per modification decisions the appropriate systems have been removed from the game/engine.

I am happy to report that by adhering to the Law of Demeter and Dependeny Injection; this resulted in very few changes to the engine at large.

From a technological standpoint the current goal is to have one large world-map, to give a better sense of where you are in the grand scheme of the Revel world. This map will be populated with icons representing villages, castles, etc. which are mostly invisible until you learn about and visit them.

Much like currently, this map will be presented for fast travel.

When you visit a place on the map, instead of having many screen-sized rooms; we'll have much larger 'rooms' which will scroll.

In addition these rooms, particularly buildings and structures will have a layered effect, in which top layers will 'reveal' as you walk behind them.

This will allow packing a lot of action into a small space, and allow us to give detail in architechture for building facades, etc. while still having that area be useful space, once revealed.

Interconnected maps will handled via room-room connections.


We'll also be structing music into playlists, instead of per-room music tracks. It was found constantly changing tracks was a bit jarring, so we're gonna try and keep that to a minimum now; and only change music naturally, or themeatically as required.


There are a lot more planned changes to talk about but I'll leave those for the next post.

-Raymond