Hello Shepherds! Today we would like to bring you our development roadmap, so that you all know what's coming up, and so that you know we are hard at work making improvements and new content for Shepherd!
Firstly we would like to thank all of you who have taken an interest in Shepherd thus far! We here on the dev team are excited to keep working on it!
On March 17th, last month, we released Early Access version 0.1.0 for you all to enjoy, and on April 3rd we released version 0.1.1 with a variety of bugfixes and new content that you can read about here.
But this is just the beginning of what we have in store for you! How about the future? In addition to minor updates, our next major update will be Shepherd 0.2.0, which we are dubbing with the name 'Clarity'. It is aptly named, as one of the biggest challenges we need to tackle first is increasing the clarity of the game as a whole. This includes adding new tutorials, explaining mechanics and UI elements, improving the clarity of the UI elements themselves, adding prompts for the player, and general quality-of-life changes to make the gameplay as clear as possible to the player.
After that, we will bring you Shepherd 0.3.0: 'Respite'. The highlight of this update is an overhaul of the current camping system. Some things in the plans for this include the ability to rename your sheep, pet them, and even play music for them, as well as changes to how the player experiences this segment of the game in order to make things more intuitive.
Once we have achieved our goals with camping, the next update we plan to release will be titled Shepherd 0.4.0: 'Warbeast'. The name is a little more foreboding, and this update is too, as this update will bring a dangerous new area to the game.
The highlights of this update include a sizable extension to the map, featuring a new canyon in which things start to get more intense than previous areas. The addition of new obstacles will force the player to keep a closer watch on their sheep, and howls in the distance signal the arrival of the COYOTE, prowling the canyon in search of prey...
Those are all the updates we will be revealing to you at this point, but we have more in the works! All I will say is that after 0.4.0 you can expect to see us begin to focus on more of the narrative elements of Shepherd. While the gameplay is vital to get working in proper order first, and is our current focus, we believe the story is an important piece of the holistic experience that we need to get right before deciding to leave early access. But that is a story for another time. We will release another roadmap once the time grows nearer, but until then, keep calm (and don't forget to feed your sheep!!!)