Hi everyone,
As I mentioned in post 100, I want to take the 2 year mark of the game being out to talk about last year’s development, some of the broader concerns, and what’s ahead for the game.
First of all: What’s going on with the numbering?
In post 100, I said that I would give an in-depth update on the game and development in post 106, as that was going to be exactly 2 years. Of course, since then I remembered that we were a week late on our 1 year update, which means post 106 is actually 2 years and 2 weeks after the game came out. Nonetheless, things have now been set in motion that are too big for me to stop, so “anniversary” posts will happen in intervals of one year and one week.
Secondly: What happened this year?
As many of you have probably noticed, we still haven’t brought out 0.8, despite me saying exactly a year and a week ago that I had already finished the coding and all that was left was worldbuilding. This was not wrong - but I massively underestimated how long it would take for me to build the world. As I already mentioned then, John has been having some issues in his personal life which have kept him from working on the game, which have not yet been resolved. I have ended up taking over most of the art as a result, which is not necessarily my strong suit, and I had to learn and relearn many of the skills involved.
Building the new map took a little over 9 months, which included creating new assets when needed, optimising other assets for their much more frequent placement, creating new code to place assets in certain contexts, and much more. Once I had managed to create the island, I also had to follow up with some more optimisation:
With hundreds of thousands of objects on the map, the game was running a lot less smoothly than I wanted it to, and I ended up switching to a new system of rendering which allowed us to improve frames per second and stabilise performance. Once that was done, further testing also showed that my vision for the pirate fortresses was a little too ambitious: with 40ish pirates defending each fortress, players would need to bring at least 40 soldiers of their own, which created battles at a scale that Unity’s built-in pathfinding had difficulty handling. As a result, I also switched the pathfinding over to a new system, which is handling battles of the scale much better, but came with its own set of issues that needed solving.
Finally, I mentioned in the last anniversary post that we still needed a number of new building models - which I am now getting around to doing. As the posts of the last 4 weeks show, I am progressing through them fairly quickly, so I am optimistic that we are finally close to 0.8 experimental.
What is currently planned?
That brings me to our plans for the future. At this point last year, I said “The obvious next step is to finalise and release 0.8”. That still holds true. Unlike last year, where I said that the main thing left was worldbuilding the new island and that this may take a bit of time (which it did), I can now state that all that is left before going into experimental is to create the last new buildings - something that is a lot more straightforward, especially after defining the general look each tier will have already.
The reason why I want to release 0.8 onto the experimental branch first is because 0.8 was supposed to be primarily focused on the tactics and strategy of the game (though it turned into a big visual upgrade, too). The new units, tactical and strategic map, new map layout, and supply mechanics all add to those dynamics, and while I already know that there are some improvements I want to make to each of them, I want to also get broader feedback from players about what does and doesn’t work for them. I am sure there will be many considerations of control and tactics that I hadn’t thought of before and that will influence just how I will implement the changes I am already envisioning - and I am looking forward to hearing about all the ways to break the game I haven’t found myself yet ;).
Once the tactics and strategies part of the game is done, I am looking forward to adding a lot more choices and ways to play with 0.9 (focused on basebuilding), which should be a lot easier to implement now that I can also make building placeholders!
Again, thank you for sticking with us and the game for this past year, and I will keep you updated along the next year of the journey!
Until next week!