Hey everyone!
We noticed earlier this week that the game has now officially been out for 1 year! Time has flown past us, working on the game and everything else in our lives, but we want to use this post to take stock of the last year, as well as where we still want to go with the game.
First of all: What happened this year?
After the game came out last year, we were able to get a lot more feedback from players than we had ever received before. We were able to fix many, many bugs, reassess some of our ideas about what the game should be, and we were able to considerably narrow down our vision for what we wanted the game to be when it was finished.
Notably, in the first half of the year, we added pirate attacks to the game, enabled multiplayer, building destruction, etc. - and decided to fully embrace the game as a PvE experience. In the second half of the year, we decided to stop regularly updating the game to focus on creating the first major update (0.8), since the many changes we were making would have repeatedly broken the live game, and many of the new features were only viable to be released together. 0.8 will be largely focused on adding more military gameplay options, making the game against the pirates more interesting (rather than just having a few waves come at you), making progression through the game more meaningful, and improving a lot of the visuals of the world.
Finally, we managed to consistently work on the game for the entire year, despite personal and professional setbacks and responsibilities, many of which were unforeseen, and we remain incredibly enthusiastic about working on, and continuing to improve the game as much as we can!
With that, let’s move on to a brief overview of what we are currently planning:
The obvious next step is to finalise and release 0.8. At this point, there are no new features left to add for this update. The only coding that still needs to be done is bug fixing and implementing the new animations (and sounds), which should hopefully not have too many unexpected difficulties creeping up. We also need to finalise world building our new island (and first coop-focused map), which may still take a bit of time, since meaningfully populating a 3 square kilometre world is no small task - but I will report on progress every week.
John needs to finish up the animations. He is about 85% through creating them for 0.8 (the bulk of the work), and planning to refine them as we progress through updates. Then he needs to create 9 new building models together with their requisite icons and villager icons and get them into the game. Finally, we need to update the tutorial to explain all the new mechanics - so basically bragging about all the work we have done over the last 6 months (but in a helpful way that shows newcomers what it is all about ;) ).
Once 0.8 is released, we will focus once more on fixing bugs and responding to player feedback for a little while, (John will steadily release additional artwork in that time like additional clothing sets for different professions etc.) before moving on to the next 2 major updates:
0.9 will be an industry update, largely focusing on the base building, new fields and a fertility system (plant - not villager), production chains, and a research system (the coding for most of this is already done but not implemented yet).
0.10 will be an adventure update, focusing on the first person gameplay, adding quests, more variety in the world, Points of Interest, and maybe some procedural worldbuilding (as mentioned in previous posts, I also finished the quest system for this some time ago - I really am not very good at doing things in order).
Thank you for sticking with us and the game for this past year, and as always, we are looking forward to your feedback and will keep you updated along the next year (or so) of this journey!
Until next week!