Zork Grand Inquisitor

July 29, 1997

I get a lot of mail from Zork fans asking when the new game will be out and how much of it is finished. The first question is easy - the game will ship this fall.

The second question is harder and is the subject of this diary entry.

Percentages, fractions, and differentials
How do you determine how much of a game has been completed? This is a particularly tricky question for an adventure game.

In strategy or simulation games, you can often tell how much of a game is done by the number of missions completed. "Oh...well, we have five of the 15 missions done, so it's 33 percent complete." In an adventure game, you can't really have just a portion of the game done and evaluate it fully without the rest of the game. It's like saying that watching the middle of Star Wars is a third of the movie. Without a beginning or an end, what good is the middle?

If playing the game can't give us an answer, how about looking at the art and sound creation tasks? Zork Grand Inquisitor is being filled up with thousands of visual images and hundreds of sound files. Right now, we have 2,780 assets, according to our database. There were 6,700 in Zork Nemesis, so I guess we're about half done, right?

Unfortunately, it is not that simple; having all the assets together does not mean that they are all incorporated or processed. Further, in ZGI, we are providing lots of wrong answer animations and sounds, which still need to be created.

OK, You Can't Tell Me How Finished the Game Is, So Who Cares?