• Undead Development update •

7 August 2008

Recently, many of you have been eagerly asking the question "When are the Undead coming?!?!?!"

We won't be giving you a release date today (there will be a press release soon! Honest!). However, what we *can* give you is an update on how the development of the Undead is coming along.

So, here are a few detailed notes that have been gathered from the various departments:

- All 17 of the new Undead Units have been fully modeled, textured and added into the game.

- 16 of those units have been fully animated (the Forsaken Rider's attack animation is currently being worked on).

- All of the Undead buildings have been modeled, textured and added into the game.

- The building animations (for when the buildings are destroyed) are also being worked on.

- The Undead battle interface has been completed and added into the game.

- The Undead nation interface is 90% complete (one small window remains and will be finished today).

- The icons for the nation interface are done, as are the icons for the Undead units and Spells. Only the spell icons remain to be added into the game engine.

- The character portraits for the Undead have been completed and added into the game.

- The music for the Undead has been completed and added into the game (check out the SAGA Facebook page for a preview!)

- The sounds for the Undead units have been recorded, edited and mastered. They are being added into the game today.

- The programmers have finished adding and modifying the game's code to add the Undead as a full-featured faction. They're now working on tournaments, along with some other new features.

- Monk spent many hours of his recent vacation running battles with the Undead, adjusting their stats and balancing their abilities.

- Only 19 particle effects remain for the Undead's physical attacks, specials, and spells. The Art department has been working on those, and inform me that each particle effect takes about 3 to 6 hours to create, adjust, and add into the game.

- The card art for the Undead units has been completed. The cards won't be added to the website until launch.

- The card art for the Undead spells is waiting for the final approval of the spells' particle effects.

- The quest writers have finished with the Undead tutorials and territory quests, and are currently finalizing which quests the Undead will be able to undertake. (On a side note, we got three new quest writers last week, and they're working on some brand new quest lines unlike anything SAGA has seen before. More on that another day.)

- The quest map (here's a new item) is being expanded. The art director has been working on this over the last week, and is nearly finished with it (To explain, the art director, amazing man that he is, drew the quest map by hand. He brought the original quest map into the office the other day, and it was amazing how much detail went into it - It's about 4 feet tall and almost twice as wide).

Lastly, the testers will be resuming full time testing of the Undead as soon as tournaments are finished (which, if all goes well, should be today or tomorrow). During testing some of the stats, abilities, spells, animation effects, and various other items will continue to be fine-tuned for release.

So there you have it, the run-down of Undead development.

• Back To News Archive •