Gabriel Knight III
2/23/99
About now I'm getting lots of e-mails and strange phone calls from gamers asking me when GK3 is coming out. Don't head for the stores yet. The date the team is shooting for is June; the official ship date, where caution reigns, is August.
So where are we? I've been spending the past month getting the first five time blocks, aka "day one," solid enough to ship to beta (there are 13 time blocks total). Everyone on the team is anxious to get to beta and elicit general comments on the game, the interface, camera model, etc. so that we have plenty of time to do any underlying functionality changes that might be necessary. And, of course, we need to make sure the puzzles are solvable so that any unforeseen voice-over hint lines can get added before we do our recording "pickup" session.
Our goal is to have day one 95-percent complete by the beginning of March, spend about six weeks on day two (complete by mid-April), and another four weeks on day three (complete by mid-May). That will give us an additional four to six weeks to do a final spit-'n'-polish and go gold sometime in June.
Day two and day three are roughly "clickable" now but still have outstanding animations here and there, some fatals, no final cameras and expressions, and generally need to be polished up and ironed out. Fortunately, I consider day one to be more than a third of the game, since many process issues will be dealt with, and we'll have set our bar for how good things need to look. By now we've passed all our "how" hurdles, and implementation is proceeding rapidly. These things take on a momentum of their own.
Now that people are seeing the game, I'm starting to get the PR-type questions. Why does the storyline go where it goes? How controversial do we want to make the box? What secrets do we leak before the game ships? What kind of backlash plan do we need to deal with any potential controversy? Do we feed or suppress it?
The story and controversy
Gabriel Knight III
