Hello everyone!
I want to start by thanking all of you that bought the game for making this a great launch day. The feedback has been great so far and I'm glad so many of you really enjoy the game.
I'm really excited to say that the launch so far has exceeded the expectations and passed the week 1 sales goal already in this first day. So the future of Moose Miners looks bright. It looks like I will be able to give the game my full focus for quite a while now and make all or most the features and content I had thought about and of course a bunch of features you are wishing for.
So now I want to talk about the roadmap for the near future and maybe a bit ahead. First of all the main focus for the first couple of updates will be bug fixes to make sure as many as possible can properly enjoy what the game currently has to offer. The biggest two issues I will look into is the blank/yellow screen issue quite a few people are having, and the crash that happens on some AMD GPUs with certain driver versions.
Both these issues will be really tricky for me to figure out since I have not been able to reproduce them on any of my different test machines. So if you experience any of them please send any crash reports and your DxDiag files as explained in this post https://steamcommunity.com/app/2591410/discussions/0/4038104984936396794/ the more crash reports and DxDiag files I get the better chance I will have to figure out a pattern in what might be causing the issue so I can get out a fix for it. Due to the very difficult nature of these issues I can't promise when I will find a fix or if I will be able to fix them at all. So if you experiencing these issues I will not blame you if you refund the game. I will update the demo with any fix I find so you can always check back and see if the demo works for you at a later time since then the full game should work as well.
After I have hopefully fixed those issues and any other bad bugs in the game the next thing will be performance. Performance is something that has been a high focus in this project since I want to be able to allow really large bases with many moose. Which in general it does quite well, especially if you have a good cpu with a good amount of cores. However there are some areas in the game where the performance is quite bad at the moment. When you have a lot of wands or sticks in the base or on the storage minecart it can really tank the fps if you don't have a monster GPU. I'm using a GTX 1080 TI on my dev machine and that can go down in single digits fps in some cases. So I would imagine that even RTX 4090 would have to put in serious work in these cases.
The issue is that there is simply too much geometry to render. Even though the game uses a low poly art style, when you try to draw hundreds of thousands of models it just becomes too much too handle. So I will have to figure out some clever ways to cull some of them without it being too noticeable.
After the performance update I'm planning on adding one or a few quality of life features depending on how big the ones I decide on are. So please let me know which things you feel would be the most important ones there. Two examples of larger ones I have thought about are a map for the base that you can bring up to get an overview and selling stuff. So if any of those are things that excite you or if you have other ideas let me know either on the Steam forums or in the suggestion channel in the Discord server. The Discord server is a bit better since there people can vote on which features they want which makes it easier to know what to prioritise.
After the quality of life update I'm planning on the first content update. The main thing in that will be extending the depth limit from the current 4800 to probability like 11 times that. While also adding some new upgrades that will be needed to efficiently mine, transport and process the high amounts of gems and trees you will get beyond the current limit. I can see on the leaderboard that some have already managed to get to the limit on both the gem side and the tree side which is impressive. But hopefully it will take a bit more time to mine out the whole map at least.
That is my current plan for the near future and then we'll see what new stuff will come after that. As always with game development it is hard to give an estimate on how long things will take, and I am working on this project mostly alone so bare with me if it takes a bit of time to get the updates out.
Thanks for reading Moose News and keep moose mining!