IIslands of War has finally left Early Access! Usually, these announcements will have loads of excitement and updates and news about the future of the game moving forward with cool updates. Sadly, this is not one of those games.
Some History
IIslands of War started as a fun project that I worked on as a university student. I seriously enjoyed my time developing this random idea about building floating islands in the sky and then blowing up other floating islands in the sky.
That was over 5 and a half years ago, and the game has been in Steam Early Access for almost exactly 4 years.
The Rewrite
However as I scoped more and more of the game, scope creep kicked in and I eventually decided that to move forward, I would need to rewrite basically the entire game to accommodate these new features. Check out some of the cool stuff I was working on:
Yeah thats right, I made an infinite grid so you could build islands of any size.
I wanted to have modules work more like a Tetris-like puzzle to try and optimize for.
Massive spikes and buildings are always cool!!
I also had plans for a story that would take you to different time lines and characters and pilots you could collect to give your island special abilities along the way and lore to go along with the strange world I was building! And monsters like giant floating whales and sky krakens and laser sharks!! And then a new map system with new ways of navigating the world with pirates that might raid you as you fast travelled and then you would have these really awesome high speed combat chases and stuff. And some out of game progression like a tech tree to unlock cooler weapons and items.
Boy did I have plans on plans...
Why did development stop?
You see, I was a pretty meh programmer back then and so the code was essentially a giant pile of spaghetti. With my final year university project in 2022 and now having a full time job in 2024, continuing development of this massive project has been burdensome and hasn't brought me any joy. So development has stopped, permanently.
The Future
As a result, IIslands of War is being taken out of Early Access, with no plans for any future development. I'm really sad about this, because I loved IIoW and poured so much into it, as the wonderful community that grew around the game. To everyone who has supported the game, thank you so much. I truly would have never gotten to this stage without you. While my time with IIoW may be over, I hope that my passion for making games never dies.
IIoW has had a great run. Thanks for playing,
jwiggs