Here’s a quick update on where we’re at.

Progress continues steadily, though it’s become clear that shipping this year was… not realistic.  As is always the case, we’ve run into speed bumps here and there, from software acting up to head colds and wildfires!  And of course, some things take longer than planned, or grow in complexity.  Still, we’re wrapping up our 10th hero this week, the Samurai, and we’ve finished several basic enemies since our last update.  The current task is to have the remaining heroes and the remaining basic enemies done by the holidays.  With those pieces in place, we’ll start the new year with what is essentially a fully playable game, ready for tuning.  We’ll be playing with damage numbers, enemy groups, and all the other knobs and switches we have to dial in the combat difficulty in January.  This should quickly get the game to a near-final state… all except for the boss encounters, the last really big task.  Bosses are already designed and at least partly implemented, but require a decent amount of extra art and animation.  I honestly don’t know how long they will take.  In some ways, they’re easier than basic enemies because they’re generally immune to crowd-control effects, so we don’t have to do a bunch of animations for being knocked down, terrified, set on fire, etc.  But they have extra abilities and some complex behavior, so it’s a bit of a tradeoff.

We’ll have a better idea of a real release date after we get one of the bosses implemented.