Hey guys, been quite a while! We've been taking a bit of a break; due to work pressures and other life circumstances, it's been hard to work on the Rebellion for the past several months. To be honest, there has been a hole in my heart where this development usually sits, and I plan on filling it again in the very near future. We're really sorry that development has been so slow, and we appreciate the support that you guys have shown despite this!
A New Direction
If it hasn't become obvious yet, we're going in a different direction with the Rebellion now. We posted about some "really cool stuff we were working on" around February of last year; at this point we silently transitioned into a fresh UE5.2 project, and began developing Rebellion again on a clean slate in an attempt to fix a lot of our problems.
The reality of The Rebellion, at least in it's current 0.25 state, is that the time it would take to produce a 1.0 version we are proud of with the current build would be longer and less effective than starting from scratch. My knowledge as a developer has increased to the point where I actually look back and laugh at some of my initial code for the Rebellion, and my brother's skill as an artist has increased similarly.
What does this mean for you guys?
- Game price will remain the same, we will not be releasing any new games until we feel The Rebellion is in a state that we are proud of. Updates are free of course.
- The current game in Version 0.25, will be kept as an alternate steam branch so anyone can play it if they want to
- It's going to be a significant amount of time before the next update
What will change?
We never really got the chance to meet our original vision for The Rebellion; the crux of which is the actual uprising and the effect it has on the game world. Commoner players are attempting to make the best of a chaotic situation; sometimes you can succeed by allying yourself with one of the warring factions, sometimes by making profit by being an arms dealer, sometimes just by surviving. When we get to the point of adding in the Empire and Rebel factions, we want to have an established economy and gameplay loop for them to interact with as well. We'll go in depth with how this will work in future blogs.
- We're stepping away from a more hardcore, fast paced RTS style like Starcraft, and trying to minimize the time the player feels the need to be in RTS camera
- We're moving a bit away from the "Soulslike" type combat that initially inspired the game, and moving towards more "nuts and bolts" medieval and first person combat. Combat system is getting a revamp to be more meaningful, interactive, responsive, and understandable (hopefully)
- We want to change the focus from PVP, to a focus on survival in the game world and environment with the element of player interaction thrown in. The goal is to leave the level with a caravan of resources, treasure, or equipment you find in the level
- We are going to focus on making several new commoner factions that will have completely different playstyles, we want to create a mesh of crossed industries that can depend on eachother in order to forge interesting player interactions (especially when Empire and Rebel factions come out)
- We are developing a Villager system that lets us have hundreds of neutral commonsfolk in the world at a time, and we have some cool systems in mind to work with these new villagers
- We're making the process of running your town and units more automated; we want players to spend more time making meaningful decisions, and minimal time micromanaging
- The world will be further fleshed out, creatures, flora, neutral towns
- Across the board the idea is to give players more replayability, more nonlinear progression systems, more fun interactions in the world, and a little more attention to detail to little things that make a game feel meaningful
Ok, so what now? When can we expect more?
I could probably write for days going into detail about each of these changes (I have, in the design documentation 🤣 ) however I'd rather just show you guys as development proceeds.
At the moment, we do have a timeline where returning to development would work for us. If life is kind, then development will pick back up later this month; we will likely have some stuff to show in October.
Thanks for sticking with us, and we can't wait to show you what we're working on!