Before I answer the question just a little reminder of what's come before us. We released a little less than a year ago. The feedback we received back then gave us a completely different direction to go in than we had originally planned. Multiplayer and original graphics.
Both multiplayer and original graphics had always been considerations for us but we originally opted to go single player only and use open source graphics because of the amount of time and/or money it would take to do both of those things. After receiving the feedback, we realized how important those two aspects were so we dove back in. And it has taken a lot of time and money. (this sounds like a “we are cancelling the game" speech. Rest assured, we’re not!:))
We spent a couple weeks trying to add multiplayer to the existing code. We had very little luck. The foundation of our code was built on single player. We decided to start the game from scratch and bring large portions of code over once we got the core of multiplayer implemented. I think it was the best possible decision for getting multiplayer working as best and as quickly as possible.
Graphics was the next big question and recently there have been developments:
Originally we payed two graphics guys to design all of the artwork. That part has been completed for months and I’ve shown some screenshots. All in all it took every penny and a little bit more than what we’ve currently made on the game to pay the two guys to overhaul the artwork. That financial reality forced me to take a hard look at our desire to add loads more content in the future. I have no problem investing in the game but unfortunately if we pay for graphics we will ultimately be more limited in the content we can produce. I think content is critical to Tile Miner in the long run. More outfits. More weapons. More tools. More underground layers. More dungeons. More enemies. More NPC’s. More magic. More more more. The more quality content we have the better the game. Another thing that came to my attention recently is that since I’ve been doing so much touching up and in some cases outright creating the art myself, I’ve gotten better and better at drawing pixel art myself. I took a few days and started dabbling in the idea to make the graphics more of a 16 bit style. In many cases I used some of what we already paid for, but in other cases I designed from scratch. I was happy with the results and so was my brother so we decided to move in that direction. Which means most of the artwork needs to be redone or resized in some way. The reason we are excited about this is simple: This will give us the freedom to add a lot more content in future updates!
So how is 0.2 coming along? I believe we will release by the end of the year. I’d be surprised if we didn’t, but I’ve been wrong before. What’s left is finishing Player vs. Enemy multiplayer, attempting PvP and a whole load of bug fixing and final polishes. Beyond that there is redoing the artwork.
Trust me on this: I can’t wait to get this release completed so that I can get busy on adding more content!