I have returned from gamescom, an event of truly biblical proportions. Launch week has ended, and I'm now pretty much caught up on email and tech support, so it's time to see what's next for the game.
Here are the things I plan to do, in order of priority:
1. Bug fixes. The launch was mercifully low on bugs, actually. I feared much worse, because each new player is a new opportunity to find bugs no one's noticed before, so usually a large influx of new players means lots more bugs discovered. But there are a few issues, which I want to fix first.
2. Balance issues and user interface improvements. For example, I had to cut key configuration from the game to make the launch date, so I'm going to put that in ASAP.
3. Popularly requested features. Probably the things people want the most are multiplayer coop and some sort of diplomacy system. I can't guarantee that I can put those in, because there can be game design or technical difficulties, but I know you want them. :)
4. Content I really wanted to put in and had to cut. Some more techs. Monsters. Some other fun little surprises.
5. Finally, I will get started on developing an expansion pack for the game that will introduce sea ships. So the game's called "Airships", but I ended up putting in landships. This added most of a year to its development time, so I wanted to avoid repeating this with sea ships. Instead, I will take my time to do a proper job of adding water, sea ships, submarines, buoyancy, drowning, sea monsters and all that, and put it into a $5 expansion pack.
And in parallel, I'm starting pre-production on the next game project, which is going to be about flying saucers...