Hey there, fellow ylanders.
Originally I planned to discuss some cool new features and improvements update 1.6 will introduce but seeing the discussions about the current state of the game and where it‘s headed, I thought it's more important to react to these instead.
Let me start by addressing the concerns about us focusing mostly on the Editor/platform instead of Exploration.
In the past years, we have spent a lot of time working on the Editor, the Workshop and the platform in general. During this time it was our primary focus, and this meant that - unfortunately - Exploration got less love than what we would have wanted. That is a fact, and we understand the disappointment of those who wanted us to improve Exploration in the first place. While we did make some Exploration improvements, these were not necessarily enough. We are also aware that some features are now actually might even be worse than they used to (probably the biggest issue is still maps being smaller).
All of this happened because of three reasons.
This year Ylands will be officially released in China (which is something that only a few dozen „western“ games achieve each year) and thanks to the support from our team here, now, months before the release, the platform there already contains hundreds of games. For Ylands, a project that we still plan to develop for many years to come, this is obviously very important.
The second reason is something we haven‘t talked about yet, but since some of you already started asking - and we are close enough to start discussing this as well; here we go. Often in the past, actually even years ago, when the Editor and platform was nothing like they are now, we kept being approached by teachers from various countries who were interested in using Ylands and its visual scripting and easy to pick-up systems, as tools to teach kids the basics of scripting & programming. At that time we didn‘t feel ready to provide such a solution, but now we got to a point where we can and want to; so this year we plan on introducing Ylands to schools as a learning tool. At first here, in the Czech Republic, followed by other countries. The Ylands version for schools will be pretty much the standard Ylands you know and love but stripped of some features (quite obviously monetization and some others). We have all the features we wanted to have but it took us long to get here.
So what‘s next?
Exploration.
We have already started focusing on Exploration with update 1.5 and that has brought a major change to the basic gameplay loop. Instead of playing many Exploration games, building your structures, ships only to lose them when you start another Exploration game, you now play in a large Exploration universe where you can keep your progress, explore any number of ylands - be it local games, games hosted on dedicated servers or locally hosted by other players.
In 1.6 we will continue with these improvements. We got rid of the barrier and will give you more power over your ylands. We are adding new ways to build with your friends and tools to prevent visitors to your ylands doing any harm. We are giving you better ways of building. We even made a lot of smaller improvements that you asked for (like introducing a rake, an object you can use to smooth terrain, etc.). Actually, there is so much cool Exploration-related stuff in 1.6 that for the first time we won‘t be able to introduce all of it in Dev Diaries before it comes out!
And the updates past 1.6? Again, a ton of cool Exploration features, fixes and improvements.
We are already planning something that will make the maps much, much bigger (the actual local maps where you move without loading). In 1.6 we, the devs, are already able to create special unique scenes in the Editor that then can be found in Exploration by players (think of Random Encounters, but entire islands). In the future, we will give the same power to you. That is how the Editor and Exploration will „click together“ and all the time and effort we put into Editor will be beneficial even for the only-Exploration players. Imagine Exploration with custom made worlds, that can be pretty much anything...
And that is, actually, the third reason why we focused so much on having a working Editor/platform first (if you look back in forum posts and Dev Diaries, you will find we dreamed this up this looooong time ago).
That is what the future of Ylands is.
I hope that this answers some of your questions (and maybe even concerns) about the future of Ylands and what role Exploration and the Editor play in it. I understand that this covers only parts of what your concerns are, and I will continue in the next Dev Diary with some other topics like server stability, our plans to get more players to play Exploration and anything else you ask for in the discussion below this post. Please note that with CM gone (we are already talking with some promising candidates) and finalizing features for 1.6 we may not be able to answer everything you ask right away and it may take some time / it will be answered in the next Dev Diary.
That‘s it for today, I will talk to you next Thursday so until then... stay healthy and classy, ylanders!