Why Tenebris took so long - August 1, 2023

The Tenebris expansion took a very large amount of time to create -- over 17 months, a far longer development time than it should have been. For comparison, the 17 months of work for Dragoon before the Tenebris expansion consisted of the entire PC port of The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt, the entire Legends Overload expansion for both PS4 and PC, and the last 2 Tenebris books (Tenebris Desolation and Tenebris Purification).

So, what caused the Tenebris expansion to take so long?

Some of what took so long was par for the course -- the new story content, new enemies and new world were probably roughly twice the size of what the Legends Overload expansion brought. The new character, Caesara, meant a lot of programming and testing for new abilities and passives. A good number of new enemies were not humanoid, which meant some extra setup had to be prepared for some of them (one particularly large monster had a lot of complex setup to it that took a long time).

The biggest consumer of time was Naval Conquest, which probably took up in the area of 40% or more of the total development time. Outside of basically having two gameplay systems running at the same time in the same world (standard field/battle and the naval exploration/combat), the size of the Naval Conquest world introduced some engine-wide technical challenges and complications that needed a lot of attention. It also seemed to have the largest number of tasks that required a whole day or a whole week per task out of any game design project I've ever worked on, so it required even more attention in that regard.

It all worked out well in the end, thankfully. I'm very very happy with how Naval Conquest has turned out, but the development time it took up was pretty significant.