Trailer with upgraded graphics
It took quite a bit of work to get rounder tile edges and 3D optimization about right. But finally the graphics works well enough for a public trailer, showing actual game play footage.
I wanted to have the 3D map, as I was thinking how to best visualize hills. And in this game hills matter - snow thaws first on the sunny southern slope, the northern side of a hill tends to be less favorable for growing crops. And in early summer lowlands are more prone to night time temperature falling below freezing.
Although the trailer shows a 3D map view, the good old 2D is also there, and you can freely switch between the modes.
Next in development
Once you send your offspring to start a homestead of their own, you can freely switch the game focus to play as any of the family units of your family tree. But currently the non-focused families will do nothing, so they need a bit of an AI. I try to design it so that when you go visit the other families they can tell you stories about what has happened in their lives since you last met. And if they are low on resources, or if they have abundance of something they could themselves pay a visit to the player family to exchange goods. So the AI should enable a mutual networks of social interaction between the families of the player clan.
Some of the social dynamics will be added to the market place as well. This will be connected to the skill system. It will take a few generations to become a master in some skills, like blacksmithing or clay pottery. And I think that if the player brings their masterwork crafts to the marketplace, the word would spread, and the next time the player shows up at the marketplace the NPCs would actively seek to barter for the famous high quality items by the player family.
Naturally, this kind of aspects alone could take a year of full-time coding to develop in full detail. But I'm not planning to post-pone the Steam release that far, but aim to implement the basics of AI and social dynamics, and then release some updates to add content and improved mechanics.
The distribution model and version numbers
I believe in the old-school approach: pay once, get the full game and all the future updates. No paid extra content, no micro-transactions, no in-app purchases, no adds, no strings attached.
The release version won't be labelled Early Access, nor beta, nor alpha funding. Just a plain release, with version number 0.9 (or a bit higher, depending on how the beta testing goes), and then a road-map to get to the final 1.0 release. Once the game reaches the 1.0 stage there will be no more content added, just basic maintenance like bugfixes.
Well, this is the basics - more news on the on-going development in the coming weeks!
Yours
Erkka from Enormous Elk