Hey BW-

You see to be a grassroots game developer, close to your peoples who love CRPGs. That is refreshing, to say the least.

Being a game developer myself I had some specific questions about the development cycle and if it's not improper I was wondering if you could shed some light on your experience?

How long was Eschalon in development and how active from beginning to end? Any long hiatus due to burn-out or technical issues? Best I can guess is it started as early as 2004.

How many lines of BlitzMax code and is it all well commented?

What graphical applications did you use? How did you do the animation? Create 3D models with minor animations and render to a sprite sheet? Done by hand?

That's all I can think of, thanks for any info!

I started in late 2004 with ideas, and then full time on the game in May 2005.

No, I did not take a break during the 2.5 year development cycle- I couldn't afford to. Working full time on the game, I lived off of savings and small consulting jobs. Fear of becoming homeless is awesome motivation for sticking to a large project!

I think the project has close to 25,000 lines of code. Yes, I do recommend BlitzMax. It's not perfect, but it is refreshingly easier to use than C++.

I used as many free applications as possible (OpenOffice, GIMP, Blender) but I also bought a used copy of 3D Studio Max to help with some of the sprite rendering. Yes, everything is rendered to a sprite sheet and loaded into the game when needed.

I wonder, how much time did it take to create a single sprite, on average? Like, if you spent 4 hours on a 3d model and then 2 hours on rendering 8 sprites, that would be about 45 min per sprite.

And how much longer it would take had they been made by hand?

Are you the ONLY developer of Eschalon book 1 ?