Near the middle of the game, the player has to gain access to the moongates to start circumnavigating secret areas on the map they may otherwise never reach. I got the logic end-to-end working on this, which is a pretty complicated series of events that lead us to getting the Moongate ring. None of this logic was working in the last beta test by Corwin’s team.

1. One NPC tells us another has holed up in a certain place and isn’t coming out. It becomes a quest for us.
2. We finally reach this recluse and he gives us the Moongate ring and asks us for a favor on our return.
3. Now using the Moongate ring, we can cycle around Hyperborea very quickly using gates we have seen in the past but were unable to access. We can in fact use the Moongates to achieve other quests and bypass existing logic for different outcomes altogether.
4. At least two locations can only be reached with the Moongates.
5. The Moongate is a “travel fast” system that allows us to jump around very quickly when we need to in order to return to areas we have not visited in a while or just want to return to in order to explore more thoroughly.
6. The problem is that once we have used the Moongate, so can other NPCs in the game … which may enable them to get to the tablets before we do.

I am editing the extensive, exhaustive logic for The Entity and Lord Ahriman in the game. They each have more than a thousand lines of dialogue, a dozen behaviours, a couple of easter eggs and some surprises in their interaction with the player.

Once these final two are done, I have to make a few changes to two other NPCs and I will consider the NPC logic closed until the final gamma testing begins.

Between now and end of August I have a large list of little tweaks and bugs to work my way through before I begin to formally organize the testing team, including some monster and spell animations to complete. Nothing major at all, just little things I left for the very end to finish off.

Almost done for real. Never been this close to the end before.

After five years of having little more than a placeholder, the Golden Era Games web site is back! Looks like we may actually be getting some games released soon so we’re going to need it!

We’re grateful to all our frequent visitors over the years who have been wondering what happened to us. We’ re back!