How far into developing the game are you? Is the 'game' (dialogue, characters, weaponry, game areas, etc) still in the concept stages, or have you started implementing it in the engine? How much time would you say the game needs to be completed?

We are still in the early planning stages. We’ve done enough brainstorming to decide on an overall direction for the game, but basically not much more than was needed to begin engine development. In other words, we have some real high level concepts about the overall gameplay, but not a lot of specific details yet.

This game needs roughly a two year development cycle, as we’re building the engine along with the game. Once we finish the engine we could turn around another rpg in about 18 months. Since we’re building everything you’d expect from a high end 3d engine into it (displacement mapping, bump mapping, specular mapping, real time shadows and lighting effects, etc) we’ll be able to utilize this engine for several projects at least.