Progress Report: November 27th, 2014

Hello again, as requested, we’ll be making more regular progress reports.  In the last couple of reports I’ve talked about the .pack files that we’re working with as we finish making the patch.  There are 294 of them in total, and they break down into two general categories.  87 of them are either related to the story, or have the text of the various NPCs you meet on File Island, and most files that have the text from cut scenes also have some NPCs in them.  The remaining 207 are all used in the Colosseum, and are individually pretty short, but in aggregate rather a lot of text.  With that said, here’s the break down.

Of the 87 story and NPC packs, we have 46 done, which puts us at ~53%.

The Colosseum has not been a high priority at this point, but there are 7 of them done, which is ~3%.  I think we can take care of these in about a week once the other packs are done though.

There are also a few odds and ends to take care of once these files are done, like the emails and news stories you recieve over the course of the game.  I don’t have an exact number on those right at the moment, but Romsstar tells me they shouldn’t take terribly long.  We’ll also need a week or so to test for bugs and such before we release the patch.  If things go well, I think it should be possible to release around Christmas time, but as I noted in my last update, it’s possible we will have to wait until some time in January.

For our American readers, happy Thanksgiving, and for everyone else, happy Thursday.

Stardate: November, 14.1th

By popular request, here’s an update.  Things are progressing well, we have been making the last round of edits as we insert the text into the game’s packs.  As mentioned in the last update, there are 294 of these .pack files, and quite of few of them for some reason are largely or entirely copies of sections from other packs.  At the moment, we have 45 of them completely finished, including the game’s three largest packs.  That puts us at 15% of the total, but we’ve been editing the largest packs first, so it’s actually more than that, but I’m not going to bother coming up with a metric to measure the actual percentage.

In other news, we ran into a show stopping bug where the game would freeze and then crash any time the items menu was opened.  We found that last night, and I can now report that CompCom has already fixed it by rewriting the pertinent sections of the insertion tool that Roxas from the GBATemp forum made.

We are still hoping to release before the end of the year, but I want to be entirely clear that it’s possible we won’t be done until January.  Either way, we’re very close to the finish line.