Nox Archaist: Nox Archaist Target Release Date

Target Date

All of us here at 6502 Workshop hope that you all had a great holiday season! We look forward to the new year and putting Nox Archaist in your hands. On that note, as we draw closer to release, we've gotten a much stronger idea of when we'll be able to ship the game. We have every major remaining step defined and documented, and will continue to give you regular progress updates.

The team is fully committed to spending the time necessary to realize the vision of Nox Archaist, and to do so without cutting corners on quality. It has always been our plan to produce a game that looks and feels like what you would have purchased off the shelf at your local computer store in 1990. If the legendary game developers of that era had continued to produce AAA-level RPG games for the Apple II, you would have found something like Nox Archaist!

Based on the scope of the remaining tasks, we estimate that our target release date is August 2020 (see below for details).

Project Status

The core functionality of the game engine is complete. We occasionally add code in order to create scenarios for specific quest lines or in a few cases adjust feature code to better align with the content.

We are confident that the vast majority of the technical risk is behind us. The road map to completion is clear:

Core game engine - Complete!
Game box, map, coins, jewel, writ, postcard, artwork, usb - Complete!
Double Hi-Res Splash Screen - Complete!
Mockingboard beta sound driver and music for town/castle/combat/dungeon - Complete!
Quick Combat stretch goal - Complete!
Finish creating content (e.g. maps, NPC schedules and dialog)
Finish writing game manual, do printing
Main game boot menu
Add music to splash screen
Character creation dialog
Beta testing
Bug fixes, combat, and economy balancing
Duplicate floppy disks and usb drives, assemble boxes, ship!

Content Creation

We're 70% complete on the content creation. Here's an outline of what's left:

Villages - 4 remaining
Towns - 1 remaining
Castles - 1 remaining
Keeps - 3 remaining
Ruins - Complete!
Underworld - 0.5 remaining

For context, a great deal of time was spent creating the engine and also scalable content development tools and processes. We've only recently reached peak efficiency for creating content.