As I understand it, we have revolutionary shadow buffer technology. Since I understand this process about as well as a coffee mug understands opera, I leave the coders in peace as they ponder the benefits of push buffers, split bafs and continuous streaming. They fight to bring up the frame-rate, reduce the amount of time it takes to load the game, and smooth out any slight stutters as you play the game. Regarding code, our programmers are going through the arcane ritual of optimization. Since a lot of the points where players get stuck on or question what to do next are simple, obvious things to us, sometimes we don't notice because we've worked on it for so long. This has proven to be an invaluable aid, as they film all the play-test sessions and send the movies to us.įollowing the antics of the people who have never played the game is most enlightening and has helped us make the game more playable.

To give us the most objective playtest results, the Microsoft usability team has been testing the game in their anonymously-named Lab, using unsuspecting 'Average Joe's' as the guinea pigs. This is easier said than done, since a seasoned veteran gamer will make mincemeat out of the monsters a beginner struggles to defeat. The most difficult task is setting the challenge level just right. This central document is used to make sure the difficulty curve of the game is not too steep, yet the game remains challenging at all times. This document already weighs in at 72 pages and is getting bigger every day. Among hundreds of other things, we've also listed every puzzle and quest you can undertake. In order to do this, we've listed every chest, weapon, monster, suit of armor, spell and Spirit Strike in the game. Our next and largest task, as far as design is concerned, is balancing the game. Luckily our large test team is dedicated and enjoys staying up until the sunrise testing the game.Īt this point, we've nailed down all the content in the game. With a game the size of Sudeki, there are so many places to visit, so many characters to talk to, so many secrets to cover and so many monsters to slay that simply testing every instance under all possible circumstances is very, very time-consuming. Hectic play-testing is being done on both sides of the Atlantic as we strive to find every misaligned polygon and every spelling mistake in the massive amount of text our game has. Most of the team is engaged in killing bugs. Sound effects are refined and the music that is played on different levels is tweaked over and over again by our zealous musicians. In this phase we do everything we can to ramp up the quality of the artwork of the characters and levels, smooth out the gameplay and make sure that all the puzzles and challenges players encounter are easy to understand and yet challenging enough to keep the players interested. FebruAs Sudeki's release date trundles ever closer, the team is focusing on what is called the 'polish phase.' This is the time when we go through every area of the game and look at everything with a magnifying glass from sound and art to design and code.

Sudeki voice actors