Late After the Storm development roadmap
It is February 16th already, and it has been a long while since my last update on AtS’ development on this blog, unless we count the January 1st teaser.
Well, here is another teaser in the form of a more concrete roadmap for AtS 0.9.0’s development:
Development diverged around the release of version 0.8.3 resulting in only bug-fixes and minor features landing in Wesnoth-UMC.-Dev trunk, which is where AtS’ releases come from. During all this time, I have been (mostly) silently working on the final set of scenarios (E3S7A onwards) in a separate ‘branch’ of sorts, with occasional code and other assets landing in trunk to ease the upcoming Big Merge work that will take place “soon”.
And by “soon”, this time I really mean it.
This development model may have given some people the impression that I stopped working on AtS altogether, but this was never the case. IftU and AtS have historically been solo projects, and I have dedicated a lot of time to programming, creating original artwork, and writing prose for both campaigns. AtS has been a more demanding energy sink because of the different standards compared to IftU, and Episode III has been even more demanding than Episode II was in every possible sense.
However, it is finally starting to pay off as I’m about to complete the last scenario of the sequence referred to in the chart above as Finale C, which is pretty much the end of the After the Storm proper. Once that is done, I will go back to some of the previous unreleased scenarios to deal with various rough edges in programming, balancing, and prose, and then perform the Big Merge on trunk, leading to the 0.8.90 release (also known as 0.9.0 Release Candidate 1). Whether this release will be public or just limited to whoever expresses interest in playtesting it is something I have yet to decide.
Since at this point all the artwork for Finale C is done and most of the programming components in place, I expect the Big Merge to take place around the end of the month. No promises on when 0.8.90 will be announced, though, nor to whom it will be announced.
After that I’m facing the challenge of writing the combined epilogue for both campaigns, which is a whole different can of worms because of some architectural restrictions in Wesnoth’s design that I need to overcome, somehow. While I am already know how the epilogue flows in advance, making it not look like shit could well be an unprecedented feat.
Once the epilogue is done, After the Storm 0.9.0 will be released. Theoretically, this should not take too long, but we shall see.
To recap, I am literally one scenario away from the epilogue, and this campaign is definitely not abandoned.
Also, if there are any campaign authors out there making assumptions about the AtS E3 plot progression, you should probably be prepared to either revise them or stick to your own alternate-universe continuity theories or whatever floats your boat.