Work on Sanctum 2 is moving along, but perhaps not surprisingly, not as quickly as I’d hoped. Part of the reason is that I’ve inevitably gotten sucked into trying to do a series of new, challenging, and (to me) very interesting things that I either didn’t know how, or didn’t have time, to do in the first chapter. Some of these include:

• Almost completely re-writing the death scripts from Sanctum 1, including a radical upgrade to the “mortal damage” code. I’ve also worked out a way to circumvent the game engine’s mortal damage limit of -10 hp for players. Players and companions who fall in battle can now survive longer before dying, and can get saving throws vs. death to hang on a little longer when mortally wounded, hopefully making for a more complex combat dynamic.
• Including lots of new tilesets, skyboxes, placeables and music, to make for a far richer audio-visual experience than in the first chapter.
• Updated travel and rest systems, and a number of new (and I hope interesting) items that can be found while exploring.

The good news is that most of that infrastructure development is now complete, along with the initial scenes of Chapter Two as the player travels through the underground passage to Mount Cassandra. As I promised at the end of Sanctum 1, these are heavy on dialogue and roleplaying, with only a few combats (including  a couple of quite challenging ones). My current playtests run a little over an hour if I read all the conversations. And between now and the end of August, I’m fairly confident that I can finish the scenes that involve reaching Mount Cassandra and rejoining the resistance, which should probably constitute around 2 hours of play time all told. After that, though, I’ll have to scale back my modding for the fall, to finish one more part-time semester of graduate school.

Since Sanctum of the Archmage is a linear module series, I think that that work might be able to stand relatively well on its own, either as a demo mod, or perhaps even as a short module in its own right. So it occurred to me to throw out the idea of releasing it in that form, probably around the beginning of September or so. I’m curious what my readers think of that idea. Would there be interest in a demo version of Sanctum 2?