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Greetings again Grey Goo Players,
It’s been about a month since we last provided an update on Grey Goo’s ongoing development, so I wanted to drop by and quickly let everyone know about some of the changes in direction we’re taking. As always, your feedback and questions are welcome in the comments below. We’ll do our best to respond either here or in the next Producer’s Letter. With that said, let’s dive in!
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We’ve made the decision to push replays back. We’re as anxious as everyone else to get the replay feature in the game, but we want to take the time needed to ensure that it is at the quality level that we want. Everyone here should remember the lag issue from a few weeks back. That particular issue was related to a critical piece of our replay system’s implementation and completely fixing it would require numerous changes to the system itself.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had the opportunity to explore a variety of workarounds and different approaches to implementation, and we’ve decided to begin development on Replays 2.0 which was scheduled for this fall. This version of the replay system works hand in hand with dedicated servers, and will provide a better end user experience by making sharing of replays much more accessible.
We’re still evaluating the solution to accelerate Replays 2.0, but we are currently estimating about a month’s worth of work. I should be able to provide a better estimate in the next Producer’s letter. Thank you for your continued patience on this front!
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Some of you have noticed that we’re developing features for the competitive crowd and have asked if we’re shifting our focus from the casual to competitive player base. While many of the features we’ve discussed do cater towards the competitive, it would be incorrect to assume that we focus solely on one over the other.
Many of us at Grey Box and Petroglyph grew up playing RTS games at makeshift LAN parties with cables strewn across the floor; hardly a casual event. At our hearts we still love turtling up, building massive armies, and meeting in the middle of the map to watch the battle unfold with our friends. While we don’t consider this casual gameplay internally (we actually call it “beer and pretzels”) , we understand that it’s not the same online competitive experience that the RTS community has grown to expect.
We have no plans to abandon the ‘beer and pretzel’ players. In fact, we have a number of unannounced features in development that support this crowd directly; however, the online competitive scene is far hungrier for new content and expanded multiplayer features. That’s why you see most of our announced features catering towards the competitive player.
Thanks Sardine for the question!
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‘Til Next time,
Cody B
Grey Goo Lead Producer