Why Into The Past took so long - June 14, 2024

I feel as though this is going to be a regular thing with these expansions.

The 10.5 months that went into the Into The Past expansion was roughly divided into the following -- 1.5 months being specific early planning/general tasks/administration work/release work, 3 months for Side Stories, 1 month for RopeRange, and 5 months for Prison Break.

Side Stories being 3 months was not too bad for time -- needing to prepare its mode-specific changes and handling for characters that were not normally playable went smoothly, and the number of event pieces (things like fade in/out, playing audio, displaying a message, changing a map, etc.) for the Side Stories wound up being larger than the entirety of Legends Overload's additional story content. To clear all of that, 3 months felt pretty good time-wise for completion.

RopeRange being about 1 month was a bit longer than initially hoped, but that was due to needing to develop an action mode that operated outside of the battle system and work being done up for difficulties that were eventually discarded. Despite this, the extra time needed for RopeRange was not a huge deal.

The real timehog for the Into The Past expansion was Prison Break, where about 1 month out of its 5 months of work was focused on creating the prison (which is procgen so far as the random rooms go AND built entirely ingame rather than using imported 3D maps) and about 2 months to program/test/fix AI issues. In particular, the AI for Prison Break was probably one of the most complex AI setups I've had to do for any game design project, just due to the sheer number of interactions with rooms, actions, schedule sections, NPC types, various scenarios, exceptions and "underlying AI" (guards needing to track and prioritize multiple actions, for example). Last second balance changes in Prison Break also required far more testing scenarios with longer testing times than standard story/battle content would need, as well, which slowed things down quite a bit.

The lengthy time needed for Prison Break also affected the timing of the preview video's release. Unlike the Tenebris preview video showing off the broad strokes for Caesara, Naval Conquest, Endless Dungeon's Pantheon Priests/Crazy Arena and more, the broad strokes alone would not effectively show off Prison Break, as Prison Break was a mode that focused on using the little things to break from the routine and prepare an escape. However, in order to allow these smaller things to be fit for a preview video, they had to be fully tested, which meant AI reacting properly as it should for the video (such as the parts of the video with the riot or Brooks smashing the table that the inmates were all sitting at for lunch). By the time that Prison Break was ready for the preview video, the expansion itself was pretty well done, which is why the preview video has appeared at the time of release and unfortunately not earlier.

Despite the time needed for it taking FAR longer than initially expected, I am really very happy with how Prison Break turned out, as it wound up being a lot bigger and more flexible in execution than I had originally expected/planned.