Hi everyone, and welcome to Path to Prosperity!
First of all: Thank you all for your interest in the game! Getting the game to its current state has been a long and pretty exciting journey, so we are looking forward to sharing the next part of it with you.
Secondly, we wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves as well as the game (though some of you already have 30+ hours in the game, so the latter part may be superfluous).
The team:
The development team consists of primarily two of us (my name is Phil, I am the programmer, John is the artist), but we have a few friends who pitch in when they can. Both John and I are working on non-game related things in our “day jobs”, so we started development of Path to Prosperity because it was the game that we wanted to play and couldn’t find.
The game:
That brings us to the game: We are big fans of strategy games, but we disliked the focus on reaction speed and predetermined build orders in many of them, as that doesn't seem very “strategic”. We thought for a long time about how we could improve on that, and our solution was to take away the player’s god-like (and almost all-knowing) top-down perspective. As with an old pre-satellite era commander, in our game, the player has to anticipate what will happen a lot more than react to what they can see is happening on their mini-map.
The game is currently pretty fun to play (we think so, and the time invested by quite a few of you seems to support that), but obviously there are a few bugs, UI issues, and we have many plans to expand on the features.
You can find our current plans on the roadmap of the website: https://www.pathtoprosperitygame.com/roadmap.php
Considering we have a ton of ideas for new features, we really want to figure out what you, the players, want to get out of the game. Ideally, we’ll get around to implementing most of what’s on the roadmap, but we will prioritise based on what the community wants to see. Please join us on our discord https://discord.gg/33VxSnZ to discuss your thoughts (and report bugs). We will also start a discussion on the steam forum in case you prefer to comment there. Two of you have already started reporting bugs on there, and we appreciate you starting the conversation!
That brings us to these little updates. We really want there to be a discussion between players and us about what people enjoy about the game, how we can improve it, etc. We have multiple social media platforms for you to share your opinion with us, but it also has to be a two way street. As such, we will try to write a little update each week to describe what we have been up to, and what comes next.
The past week:
As some of you have probably seen, we have already put out two hotfixes since release, and we are releasing another minor update tonight. You will be able to find any patch notes in the steam discussions forum, and we will try to also keep you updated here. Last week was mostly focused on a few save function issues, which had prevented games from saving and loading all data. Most of those should be fixed now, as far as we can tell (apparently a few more save bugs were created by my fixes, so I will address that ASAP).
The coming weeks:
To start with, we want to also acknowledge that we haven't gotten around to all of your feedback from the past week yet. We are still working on it, and will keep releasing fixes as they come up. In particular, we found out that the lack of an option to change your key-bindings means that some regions with particular keyboard layouts can’t really play the game at the moment. I will prioritise getting that done.
John wants to improve the art overall in the long run, but he has decided to start the process by addressing earlier models that aren’t up to the same standards as the newer work. Specifically, he wants to start by modelling better Villagers and Pirates. He has already been working on improving some of the fundamentals, and from what I can tell, he has made some good improvements - they are not ready for this week's release, but will hopefully be upgraded next week.
Please let us know if you have any thoughts on the game, balance, or have found bugs!
Until next week, and good luck finding the secrets of the island!
