Prophesy of Pendor 4.0 Developer Notes

[saxondragon]

Hi all, I just wanted to give a further update on our development of PoP4. We have a number of goodies ready to be revealed. Most of the artwork is still being polished so this post will mainly be about the features.

Player Owned Base
You asked, we have listened. Own your own treehouse! Our scene builders have been hard at work creating this. It is furnished with all the important things, for instance a chest, your minister and a swing.

New Minor Factions
Dwarrows - Men of a small stature, known for their exceptional sturdiness and good metalwork

New Orders
Order of the Pink Pansies - The primary Snake Cult Order, named after the particular type of flower Azi Dahaka likes to feed her pet snakes.

New Personality Spawns
Hauron - Leads an army of very ugly yellow men with crude weapons.
The Three Beers - Alaric von Brouhahaha and his 2 drinking partners.

New Weapons
Thundersticks - Long sticks of iron which erupt with the power of a thunderclap and tend to result in the death of someone a couple of meters away. Uses Firearms skill.

New Features
A multiplayer campaign mode... We have had to massively modify the base campaign to make this work. At the moment each player chooses a major faction and then you fight for static tiles. These tiles can be "forest" "town" "castle" "plains" "hills" or "desert". Each tile your faction owns gives certain benefits, for instance new recruits and gold. Battles are in real time, fought as per normal Mount and Blade. We will try to rework the campaign map in for PoP5, but at the moment we simply do not have the resources to do this AND add in all the new factions / map.

We hope that you will enjoy these new offerings.

Best regards,

Saxondragon

[Suspicious Pilgrim]

Hi all, I just wanted to give a further update on our development of PoP4. We have a number of goodies ready to be revealed. Most of the artwork is still being polished so this post will mainly be about the features.

Player Owned Base
You asked, we have listened. Own your own treehouse! Our scene builders have been hard at work creating this. It is furnished with all the important things, for instance a chest, your minister and a swing.

New Minor Factions
Dwarrows - Men of a small stature, known for their exceptional sturdiness and good metalwork

New Orders
Order of the Pink Pansies - The primary Snake Cult Order, named after the particular type of flower Azi Dahaka likes to feed her pet snakes.

New Personality Spawns
Hauron - Leads an army of very ugly yellow men with crude weapons.
The Three Beers - Alaric von Brouhahaha and his 2 drinking partners.

New Weapons
Thundersticks - Long sticks of iron which erupt with the power of a thunderclap and tend to result in the death of someone a couple of meters away. Uses Firearms skill.

New Features
A multiplayer campaign mode... We have had to massively modify the base campaign to make this work. At the moment each player chooses a major faction and then you fight for static tiles. These tiles can be "forest" "town" "castle" "plains" "hills" or "desert". Each tile your faction owns gives certain benefits, for instance new recruits and gold. Battles are in real time, fought as per normal Mount and Blade. We will try to rework the campaign map in for PoP5, but at the moment we simply do not have the resources to do this AND add in all the new factions / map.

We hope that you will enjoy these new offerings.

Best regards,

Saxondragon

Hm...

[noosers]

What SD wanted to write wasn´t Thunderstick.

It was Boomstick!!!

[saxondragon]

hmm.. like this? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twcK2T6aeXY


This april fools joke has been brought to you by the evil twisted mind of M0rdred..

Please disragard the previous post and file it under "April Fools!".

Best regards,

Saxondragon

[Harding Grim]

R u srs bro? I'm actually really, really excited for the treehouse swing. I'm crossing my fingers for it.

[King Mindaugas]

I beleaved in that untill the "Order of the Pink Pansies" lol

[Caldex]

great story

[Sibilance]

I'd play that mod. Good one.

Looking forward to the next real update whenever it's available. (And SD, do you have any response to my queries on page 1?)

[saxondragon]

I'm curious about the "new playable area" wording, and would like to hear more. Would I be correct to surmise that the reason we're moving from Pendor to Amala and effectively working off a new mod framework is so the students have the experience of creating and balancing and fine-tuning a new gameworld from the ground up? Loosen the bonds to the already-existing modding philosophies and all that?

Does 4.0 mean that the final iteration of 3.x is a finished product? Could you foresee tying the new and old gameworlds together in some creative way? As in, complete a set of goals in Amala and then hop on board a ship to the brave future of our present Pendorian gameworld for innovative hard-mode challenges yet unforeseen? Or is that story finished?

And will we of the Taleworlds community have the chance to interact with your students? Useful skill for them to develop, and we're a friendly bunch.

Interesting question:  The current 3.31 is "finished" and I have no plans to add new features to it, or to spend additional time for fine tuning balance at this moment.

Can I foresee tying the two game worlds together?  They are tied together, just not physically.  POP 4.0 starts up at the end of the game of 3.31, after it has been "won".

There are real technical limitations in terms of game resources that would prohibit the merging of the two offerings into one game.  We are already seeing POP 3.31 busting at the seams due to the amount of game resources loaded: and we match that for 4.0.   

Besides this, the time lines do not match.  POP 4.0 is set a generation or so beyond the end of POP 3.31.

The students of this program are receiving the experience of what it is like to work in a multi-cultural distributed development environment.   They are not full time employees, but spending 12 to 20 hours a week working on this depending on their "role" on the team.

They are facing the same problems that any game development team does, and are working through them as we go.  This is a very challenging experience for them especially when working with our regular team members who are past "school" and well into the real world with their respective careers, levels of expected performance and acquired expertise.   

Best regards,

Saxondragon

   

[Belendor]

12 to 20 hour per week?

Woah and i was wondering "Do i spend much time on modding?", i am spending half of my day on modding at least 2 days in a week.

[saxondragon]

The coders and main designer spends a great deal more time than that on these mods.   Twenty hours a week is a light level of time investment.  I warn my class and budding game designers, coders and artists to expect this level of commitment ahead of time so they can properly manage their various time commitments.

I have spent a sustained 80-90 hours a week on Pendor in past releases for months at a time.  The majority of our core team has also done high levels of time expenditure as well, especially Mad Vader and Fawzia who actually took the ideas and performed the work for the mod.

As I mentioned elsewhere, POP 3.31 is the combined effort of a great many people that represents roughly 4000 hours of effort not counting the time that people have spent playtesting, and error trapping. 

Generally you have a central coder/designer who is the project lead and he/she farms out projects to various people who want to contribute.  They take that contribution then integrate it into their own work to produce the finished product.

It is quite the task.

Best regards,

Saxondragon



 

[Belendor]

The coders and main designer spends a great deal more time than that on these mods.   Twenty hours a week is a light level of time investment.  I warn my class and budding game designers, coders and artists to expect this level of commitment ahead of time so they can properly manage their various time commitments.

I have spent a sustained 80-90 hours a week on Pendor in past releases for months at a time.  The majority of our core team has also done high levels of time expenditure as well, especially Mad Vader and Fawzia who actually took the ideas and performed the work for the mod.

As I mentioned elsewhere, POP 3.31 is the combined effort of a great many people that represents roughly 4000 hours of effort not counting the time that people have spent playtesting, and error trapping. 

Generally you have a central coder/designer who is the project lead and he/she farms out projects to various people who want to contribute.  They take that contribution then integrate it into their own work to produce the finished product.

It is quite the task.

Best regards,

Saxondragon



 

You really know your job, dont you?

Still i find investments on timing to mod less than it should be but as it is a free project i guess somethings mustn't be taken so seriously. Butaway i remember i have given you word about the some banners but due to my fish mind i forgot it, if they are still needed i can make and send them in upcoming days but if somebody has already done it whether you can give me another job or fire me.

[NicotiN]

Hi all, I just wanted to give a further update on our development of PoP4. We have a number of goodies ready to be revealed. Most of the artwork is still being polished so this post will mainly be about the features.

Player Owned Base
You asked, we have listened. Own your own treehouse! Our scene builders have been hard at work creating this. It is furnished with all the important things, for instance a chest, your minister and a swing.

New Minor Factions
Dwarrows - Men of a small stature, known for their exceptional sturdiness and good metalwork

New Orders
Order of the Pink Pansies - The primary Snake Cult Order, named after the particular type of flower Azi Dahaka likes to feed her pet snakes.

New Personality Spawns
Hauron - Leads an army of very ugly yellow men with crude weapons.
The Three Beers - Alaric von Brouhahaha and his 2 drinking partners.

New Weapons
Thundersticks - Long sticks of iron which erupt with the power of a thunderclap and tend to result in the death of someone a couple of meters away. Uses Firearms skill.

New Features
A multiplayer campaign mode... We have had to massively modify the base campaign to make this work. At the moment each player chooses a major faction and then you fight for static tiles. These tiles can be "forest" "town" "castle" "plains" "hills" or "desert". Each tile your faction owns gives certain benefits, for instance new recruits and gold. Battles are in real time, fought as per normal Mount and Blade. We will try to rework the campaign map in for PoP5, but at the moment we simply do not have the resources to do this AND add in all the new factions / map.

We hope that you will enjoy these new offerings.

Best regards,

Saxondragon

The scorpion assassins who atack the player are upgraded to men with hoods wearing some white clothes and hidden blades, they resemble the guy from assassin's creed.
The knights of dawn are upgraded to men with black costumes, pointy ears and a big cape....kind of like a man bat.
Special spawn: The honorable Blackbeard with 500 hundred men with no armors but armed with muskets, cutlasses and attack parrots.
New mercenary band: Metal snake and his army of holled barels
New castle for elves: Rainbow castle, you need a pot of gold to acces this location.
Ps: the minister is there to push the swing, right?

[mp84]

Still i find investments on timing to mod less than it should be but as it is a free project i guess somethings mustn't be taken so seriously. Butaway i remember i have given you word about the some banners but due to my fish mind i forgot it, if they are still needed i can make and send them in upcoming days but if somebody has already done it whether you can give me another job or fire me.

We already have someone working on the Banners, and what we're seeing so far is pretty impressive, so we're good on that front

[Belendor]

Still i find investments on timing to mod less than it should be but as it is a free project i guess somethings mustn't be taken so seriously. Butaway i remember i have given you word about the some banners but due to my fish mind i forgot it, if they are still needed i can make and send them in upcoming days but if somebody has already done it whether you can give me another job or fire me.

We already have someone working on the Banners, and what we're seeing so far is pretty impressive, so we're good on that front

Oh, glad to hear! I was eating my mind how am i going to prepare them in my sparing time.