Hello there.
It's been a while since we talked about the development of the game, and instead we posted our last few updates with mostly fixes, small additions and changes to the overall balance of combat in the game.
One of our main concerns regarding the game is transparency, and it was our decision to make a timeline where we make our predictions for our development process and lay out a comprehensive way to tell players what our goals are.
Currently, as our timeline stands, we made progress in lots of areas which were not predicted there, but lacked in others that were made there and are not ready yet. Below we detail the development points where we are late and explain to you why, and how we are going to solve it:
2020
* June: Estabilishment of ranked play and support for territory conquest
This is our number one priority right now for development. We are lacking only one map as texture to finish a several provinces, where players can travel and interact with cities and each other in the same municipality. We wanted to make a different map for each city in the world, but its a far-fetched goal, now that we calculated roughly more than 800 (!) municipalities. We might make several layouts and change them slightly and distribute across all of them, as a way to portray uniqueness to them.
Ranked play is tough, because we do not have a large enough consistent player base for it, and might not have it for some time. Its not in our plans to make players wait for hours in a queue until other player logs in. We decided, however, to use an ELO system adapted for our needs and make every game season reset the scores. The top players get rewards in the form of in-game permanent skin unlocks, some reserved for the seasons, only.
We believe that once territory conquest as a game mode is ready, it will bring a breath of fresh air into our game and portray a much more accurate view of our plans for our game.
* July: Minigames
We have several ready to be launched once territory conquest is available.
* December: New tribe voted by the community
Thank you all for voting. Our poll was a success and the most voted tribe was the Alans, and will be the new tribe to be implemented in the game, the fifth. We are focused right now in finding artists to aid our current ones to draw the new soldiers, and once they are ready, we estimate roughly one and a half months to animate them all and implement them in the game. We might speed up the implementation with only four or five soldiers if we lag much more on this.
2021
* February: Tournaments
We expected to have a base of players by then, but the problem of making ranked play also applies here. Being easier than having ranked play, this may be an easier milestone to finish than the June 2020 ones; the plan is to mix in territory conquest and tournament play, in a more dynamic ranked play-type.
* March-June: New tribes and soldiers
Judging by our current development speed, we are sorry to inform our players that it is not realistic in our budget right now to create this type of content. This does NOT mean we will not make more tribes or soldiers anymore, but that our development focus has changed due to a combination of financial misfortunes. Its not in our minds to lay blame on others; the marketing and sales of our product has suffered greatly, and its on our minds to change it and make the product more profitable, so we have the funds to keep paying for development. It is important for players to note that Rise of the Foederati is entirely funded by two men and developed by another who are passionate about it and aim to create a wonderful gaming experience for all, but as human beings have families and priorities that shift according to how much they can keep funding out of their pockets this vision.
As a transparency note, we'd like everyone to know that ever since we started developing the game in 2017, our efforts have not diminished, and will not, regardless of how much our sales are a part of the funding of its development; and as the main developer of the game, I fully disclose that the entirety of the game's sales profits are going, and will go entirely into the development of our game, until it is able to fund itself entirely. Not a single cent is being withdrawn to me or any partner involved in the project for personal use. Many projects in the past have been plagued by misuse of indie games' sales figures, and one of our main concerns is to dispel such possibilities from the minds of any person who purchased or aims to purchase our game.
As said before, we talked about the points we missed in our timeline. Below are the points we managed to conclude:
* The Franks
* Bug and code cleanup
* New soldiers (August)
* The Suebians
* 2v2 Battles
* New soldiers (November)
And below are points we developed in our game without direct mention from our timeline:
* Item quality system
* Unit customization through abilities/stats
* Market trading
* Dialogue system with soldiers
* Traits
It is a great pleasure to have you all with us during our journey to a full release. Our efforts are rewarded by you guys being so considerate and patient with us. In the next months, we will release a new timeline with these changes, appointing what we managed to conclude and what we didn't, and our new plans for the future.
This should be ready and uploaded in a new patch by the end of February.
