Road to 1.0 & The current state of the game
The elephant in the room Hello everyone! 👋 First and foremost, let’s address the elephant in the room. I haven’t posted any news, nor has the game been updated in the last 13 months. I’m really sorry for keeping you in the dark, especially here on Steam. Mall Craze started as a
The elephant in the room
Hello everyone! 👋
First and foremost, let’s address the elephant in the room. I haven’t posted any news, nor has the game been updated in the last 13 months. I’m really sorry for keeping you in the dark, especially here on Steam. Mall Craze started as a hobby side project of mine in 2019, and since spring 2023, I’ve been working on the game full time.
That has changed in January last year, as I was not able to continue the development in the same manner. The last year was spent stabilizing my financial situation, so that I could get back to developing the game at least part time. Many times during the year I tried to restart the development, but life kept happening and I had to postpone things again. Fortunately, things got better and I’m now optimistic about the long term stability of the development.
With that being said, let’s take a look at the current situation:
I will continue developing Mall Craze as a side project in my spare time, instead of full time.
The frequency of updates will highly depend on the current amount of work that I have at my job (I’m a freelance videographer/motion graphic designer, so some months are busier than others).
I’m going back to 2019/2020, where I treated the game more as a hobby side project that was not primarily driven by ensuring the game generates enough revenue to justify itself. Arguably, this early period was probably the time where I had the most fun with the game.
What comes next?
Mall Craze was originally released into Early Access on September 19th, 2023. Since then, I’ve tried to improve the game in many different areas. While the game is undoubtedly in a much better state now than it was in 2023, it is still nowhere near the state that I would consider to be done, nor the state that I envisioned it to be when the game eventually achieves its full 1.0 release.
Speaking of which, let’s take a look at the new roadmap for the 1.0 release
I hope that I’ve learned my mistakes with the Early Access launch, and this time I would really like to make sure that the game launches in the best possible state that I can do.
Phase 1 - While I was making the roadmap and going over the main areas of the game that need improvement, there were 2 main areas: content and features. Both of which are currently lacking in various ways. For Phase 1, I’ve decided to focus more on the current content that the game has, but just add more. The reasons are two-fold: it will be much easier to ease back into development that way, and the game also needs more content for me to start developing other features, like a proper business game mode and such.
Phase 2 - During this middle phase, the game will start getting more feature updates rather than content updates. I might still sprinkle some new shop or stall here and there, but the main focus will primarily be on adding completely new stuff and mechanics.
Phase 3 - Getting ready for release. At this point, the game should be almost done when it comes to content and features, and the focus will mostly shift towards adding additional non-gameplay related stuff like localization, achievements, optimizations, Quality of Life (QoL) changes, Etc.
Also, as you can see, there are no timestamps for each phase. I’ve deliberately decided to omit these, because right now it would be really hard to give accurate estimates.
See you in the next update.
I will be starting to work on the next update next week, and I’m really looking forward to working on the game again!
Milan, Developer
