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Hello Strategists! :csgogun: This it. The big one. The one post that allows me to restore some faith in this project to our peers, and to give this project the love it deserves. So, here it is, in all its glory. Before we begin, I’d like to make sure you have the following…
- A drink of choice.
- A snack of choice.
- Patience to read a HUGE post, because man.. I got a lot to talk about today!
Let’s begin at the beginning… The past few weeks in hindsight.
Roughly two years ago, this game got released on Steam, and it has been in development for close to a decade. That is no feat to misunderstand, of course, and the team is forever grateful to SanderN for his incredible dedication towards the project. We have all, of course, noticed that development updates got few and fewer, and in terms of updates that the time inbetween updates was getting bigger, and the frequency fewer. It isn’t surprising, as someone who has had the pleasure of looking into the team structure these past few weeks.
I got hired by Mr. Darkness with the sole intent of assisting the Community, answering questions, and more of these related tasks. It took me all of three days to notice that what was once a populated game, was now a ghost town, and that something had to happen. In my previous post, I mentioned being snowballed into Project Manager. Of course, this isn’t my official title, but it is the title that fits closest to what I do for the project. I have had the success of bringing a team, on the brink of being demoralised and exhausted, some new life with three new additions, and that seemed to do the trick. Developers are slowly returning from their hiatus, and I notice them going into the SDK tools more frequently every day. There isn’t a better feeling than this, I can assure you.
Onto more relevant and current news, what is to be expected? What can you, as user, do to help us? And more importantly, what can we do to help this project? These are all thoughts I’ve been contemplating heavily.
Our plans.
What’s a project without plans is something I’ve questioned for a while, and how to tackle this with the team. Our first task was to establish deadlines, and decided to categorise these into the four quarters of a year. More on this in a bit.
Furthermore, we’ve asked ourselves what we want to do with the project. Conclusion? Uncertain. I’ve heard a lot of wanton tones questioning our direction. Too lore-focused, and too little focus on expanding the creative mindset of the game. I’ve personally thought of ways to tackle this, ranging from units from Black Mesa to entire new scenario’s. Our short-term plans to expand on the creative mindset, will make itself known in just a bit, when we arrive at the roadmap.
I’ve had the pleasure of talking about all these things, and then some, with the development team the past few weeks.
So, onto the crux of this post, which is the development roadmap.
Allow me to start by saying that this was the hardest to decide on, as we had no sense of direction for the game, and we still don’t, as funny as that may seem.
This is something we’ll look to address, though, in the coming months, and I hope I can provide a direction through my direct interaction with the playerbase at large, the team and our volunteer moderation team, which is also something I’d like to touch on later in this post.
Onto the roadmap.
The roadmap is seperated into quarters, each quarter lasting 3 months, from the 1st, to last day of the month. Quarter 1 through 4, which means January to March, April to June, July to September, and October to December. This is our plan for the coming year. These plans are not static, and may change based on demand, unforeseen consequences ( :alyx: :eli: ), and other circumstances to be defined by ourselves.
Q1: Jan-March
This is the most intensive month to our own understanding, as we try to lay focus on a lot of cores that people wanted us to touch on for a long time now. There is a high probability that the coding aspect of these changes may not be done before Q3, so some overlap is expected.
- Expanding on defensive structures, performing QA tests, and making sure they are balanced.
- Re-evaluation of all sounds, and if need be coming up with higher-quality replacements.
- Major focus on missions! Yes, that’s right, we’re finally delving deeper into these possibilities. Story creation is already under way, and two of our level designers are already working at converting multiplayer maps to singleplayer purpose, alongside at least one new map. We’re taking many things into account, and Zombie/Antlion related missions are not closed out of the creative process yet.
- Several convenient additions to the game, such as a way to cycle through idle workers.
- Some extra commands that you’d find in every RTS game, especially behavioral commands, such as offensive, defensive, idle, etcetera.
Q2: April – June
The second quarter will be a less intensive quarter for us, as we would all like to take a break sometimes, right? With Summer around these months, most of us will likely be on holiday, or elsewhere, so we’ll work with a smaller team during these months.
- Major focus on left-over problems from the first quarter, and fine-tuning balance.
- Passive updates to existing resources, such as commands and so forth.
Q3: July – September
- Finishing up on tasks that weren’t finished in Q1.
That’s it for the roadmap currently, as not much beyond Q2 was planned out. I’d like to start the team off easy the coming few months and let us work up to bigger changes, so we ask that you have patience. The third and fourth quarter will be presented along July, or later.
So, with that out of the way, our next segment is...
Community and Playerbase plans.
This is a big segment that I feel contributes to the development. After all, we’re all volunteers, and for volunteers the appreciation of the playerbase is a direct catalyst to our motivation.
In order to streamline a lot of internal tasks, and to eliminate the obvious, I’ve come up with a couple of steps to implement over the coming few months;
- Introduction of a fully fledged Community Team consisting of Community Moderators and Officers, Discord Moderators and Officer, and so on. These are part of the volunteer Community team, who will – together with me – take over a lot of the communication previously done by Developers. This will allow developers to focus more on the game, rather than the politics behind a game. (They are free to do so by own choice, of course, but no longer will they feel forced to reply.)
- Expanding the Social Media Team. While it may seem only secondary, we need the public exposure we once had, and we’ll need some peope on Social Media and PR in the ideal situation. This will be something for longer term, however.
- Laying focus on the steam discussions – it requires no additional signup once you’ve followed the game, and allows for the same amount of cooperative thinking a Community should be granted, without the invasive and often unused forum signups. (The LW Forums are already largely deserted, the most recent messages being my own.)
- More community interaction in the form of events. Beta tests hosted by us, games with the developers, tournaments, AMA’s, Q&A Streams and more of this are all in the planning, and the development team is excited to give you their thoughts on the project, and how to go from there. You may have noticed by our polls we do intend to start up an AMA this quarter.
Some of the questions and concerns the users have/had given closure...
Q. Zombie faction? Antlion faction?
A. I’ve been discussing this at length with the developers, and I’m sorry to say that the zombies and antlions will not make any debut as a multiplayer faction to control. Besides their sporadic involvement in multiplayer (vorts or crates), they will only make their appearance in singleplayer missions once those are released. We’re sorry, but there is no viability for such factions.
Q. Balancing issues, will you fix them?
A. As you read in our roadmap, a balanced game is one of our top priorities, and will be taken into account with every new addition we make. All we ask is that you have patience and work with us.
Q. What will you do about the lobbies / offensive players?
A. The real answer is? Nothing. Not because we don’t want to, but because we’ve got our hands tied here. A ban system is in discussion, but the developers are largely inconclusive on the whole prospect. Other than that, the only way we can hope to beat the stigma public lobbies bring with them, is by revitalising the playerbase. We’ll need your help on that one, though.
Q. Will you add ---?
A. We love suggestions, and we love adding them even more! We encourage you to seek out the Steam discussions page for our game, and letting us know what you’d like to see added. Forward thinking starts with everyone!
In conclusion...
An exciting year ahead of us, which will prove its life span and viability once more, or the other way around, whether this was a nice try, but better luck next time.
Time will tell us, and for now, we’re all content at what we’re doing, which is slowly starting back up from a long hiatus. So, wish us luck!
With this, I’d like to close off this announcement, which has now spanned over 1800 words, and let you get back to the gaming!
You can expect these kind of updates at least once every month, although perhaps not as big as these.
~Songbird and the team.