Rikitatsu wrote:i remember Yu Suzuki last year or so saying "he hope to show us the updated models for Ryo&Shenhua soon", so they clearly intended to work on it earlier and not relegate it to later stages of the project... Besides, it's the main character... How can it not be a priority when it would be the first thing people would look at when showing the game?
"Soon" is nebulous and doesn't really mean anything specific. Maybe he did plan to show sooner rather than later, and maybe plans changed. Maybe Yu didn't know when he'd be able to show them and made an optimistic statement that didn't pan out. It doesn't actually matter.
But also, especially on a budget, what you need to make the game properly does not always agree with what you need to show a game off. Cory Barlog of God of War fame said time taken to create that highly polished E3 '16 demo took two months away from the development of the full game, and it's always the same when producing those impressive vertical slices for trade shows.
Shenmue III isn't in a similar boat, because God of War has a huge budget and can probably afford a few delays anyway, but if YSnet instead took a couple months to really scrub up the visuals while neglecting many of the crucial things listed in the function testing, then it's going to come out of the game's ass later down development.
Front-loading those important things should ensure you can have sufficient time to refine and tweak as you go, and don't rush/cut/botch them. Graphical elements are comparatively easier and quicker. Do you remember how the graphics for the original Shenmue and Shenmue II improved closer to release? Do you remember how that was basically how games were before the super slick vertical slices became the de-facto way to show off a game? Yu is doing this old school, but also because it's a more sensible development approach overall for the budget.
Rikitatsu wrote:By the way, where does it say that backgrounds have taken priority over character models in the flow chart? I don't see anything in the flow chart that describes character modeling. So how did you infer that?
I inferred it through the bolded. If it's not listed on the workflow like the game world elements are, I have to assume it was not a priority during prototype.
I'm not a game developer but I'd have to assume the bulk of the work on character models and final graphical elements all would come after the Technical Design Document that mandates "this is how big our polygon budget is", "textures must be this resolution for this class of model, and this resolution for these others", etc etc etc, in order to make the models in accordance to what they can and can't do technically with the game.
Again, I don't really know but I'm gleaning information about software development to try getting a fuller picture of what they've been doing and where they are.