On February 19th, Disco Dodgeball will be graduating from Early Access and officially released as version 1.0. The project started in July 2013 and went from being a web prototype, to a Humble widget, to a Greenlight title, to Early Access, and now soon will be my first released game on Steam.
It's been a blast working on it and couldn't have done it without all of your feedback and support. Being a solo developer has some unique challenges, one of which is trying to be creative in an isolated environment. But having a community of excellent people like you to help brainstorm with has made a tremendous difference in this regard and I think the game and my own mental health are in a much better state because of your participation.
The sometimes stressful and frustrating parts of building a game are made much easier knowing that there are people out there who care about the work you're doing - it provides meaning and purpose that help me get through the difficult parts.
I know it's hard these days to take the leap on an Early Access title so I really appreciate your trust and hope you find it's been an enjoyable process to see it improve over the past several months. I'm very happy with how the game has turned out and can't wait to get it into more people's hands.
That said, I don't view the game as 'done'. This in the same sense that I don't think a game like TF2 will ever be 'done'. There are major features to build that I didn't feel were necessary for official launch, but could dramatically extend its gameplay lifetime and open up huge new areas of content expansion.
I was very careful not to overpromise during the game's development and I won't change that going forward. But depending on how launch goes, some of those specific things I will try my best to add are things like:
- Steam Workshop support for sharing/trading/selling custom cosmetic items that players create
- Level editor
- Local multiplayer
- Clan support
- New game modes
- Co-op challenges
- More Arcade powerups
- VR support
Again, I can't promise any of this because a lot depends on launch. But I felt it would be nice for you all to know that my intention is to keep adding onto the foundation of 1.0 and keep making this game even better.
I'll make another post right after launch that goes into a bit more detail about the order and timing of these additional features. I'll also try and make a publicly available to-do list to you all can vote on the major and minor features you'd like me to prioritize.
Again thanks for everything, and happy dodgeballing!
Erik