Keeping Secrets

Well, we just finished a major planning session for Threshold RPG, and I'm thoroughly excited. One of the hardest things to do in a live game is to decide how much change a game can handle. We've found out several times that a live game can get devastated by design changes. Since then, we've been very careful about our planning and our implementation. Ultimately, the fact that Threshold is a live game is why we decided to create Primordiax, our second game. Primordiax has some of same qualities of Threshold, but the game mechanics are a bit more complex. In addition, the world is a bit more developed and planned.

Anyway, back to the main point: We've completed a major planning stage for Threshold. I'd love to blab it all over the place, but one of the hardest parts of my job is keeping development plans a secret until they're close to being done. Why do we do this? So that players do not bank their enjoyment on vapor-ware. Several games have promised all sorts of stuff, including Threshold, and then plans change. Unfortunately, players have already had their heart set on the promised item, and when that never comes around, it adds to their disappointment. Don't get me wrong. I know that when we've shared our hopeful plans with our players, we've always been really excited and ready to go to work. The problem usually comes in during some part of the coding phase or someone thinks up something that makes the feature a game breaker. We're much more careful now about what we post and what we announce. Unfortunately, that makes it look like things are not being done, which is almost always untrue.

So, the good news is that we're going into development for a major new system on Threshold. The bad news is that I can't post about it yet.

Stay tuned!