Looking back at the history of game development for PC and console it is very easy to see why so many people get hung up on what we might call “Dev and Dump” titles. Where a studio releases a title after X amount of years working on it and if it does well, it makes money and gets a sequel. And if it doesn’t do well they cut their losses and either close up shop or move on to something else. Re-purposing their tools as they can.
However in the year 2024, because of the progression of technology and the spread of the internet across the globe, developers like myself are no longer beholden to the idea that once you’re launched, you’re done. In fact I would go so far as to argue that launching a game is really only about 75% of the work. Especially if, like myself and the team at Blind Alien Productions, a developer is looking to curate a library of games over time and not just dev and dump titles on to store fronts.
Where as games as a service see annual updates in the forms of season passes or battle passes, games curation means maintaining our games with visual updates, bug fixes, and balance changes as we collect feedback from a community of players vested in the games we make. There may even be feature additions or story driven expansions spun off from the main project files if there is enough community demand from it.
So even though the story is complete, and the feature set filled out in accordance with our internal plans, if the players want more of what FR1 offers, then I and the rest of the team are very much capable of delivering on that.
And to show you more of what games curation for FR1 looks like I have some images below.
Below is new tunnel art for train tunnels. Similar is coming for naturally occurring caves.
Behind the scenes of all these gorgeous pictures I am also working on streamlining the entire process of creating content for the Frontiers Reach Universe. Everything from small tools to make positioning groups of objects quick and easy to refactoring large portions of code and cleaning it up to make it run better and easier to understand for future integrations. And in some cases, the tech being developed for future titles is being back ported to previously launched titles now in maintenance mode. Like a new method for doing fast travel between planets like in the video below.
And last but not at all least, we’re getting closer and closer to achieving a near seamless transition between planet and space environments. This is a pretty big step in the direction of creating FR2 and the methods developed to manage the levels and art for this transition will definitely be pulled into Frontiers Reach 1 to bring up the visual quality when you’re flying around in the newly improved and expanded levels you can see in the images above.