We will finish this game by Q4 2026 and until then there's a lot to do. It's interesting to make a full game as a team of two because you can experience how your focus shifts between the areas that require the most attention over the duration of the project. It all starts out with design, finding the backstory, making a technical framework and deciding on a visual language. And then gradually over the course of the project the design job becomes "editing" (nerfing, balancing) and the programming job becomes "bug fixing". The writing job is also more concerned with creating clarity and coherence more and more instead of coming up with new lines. And you end up spending loads of time with marketing. That's where we are by now: in the phase of the project where the cornerstones are in place but we still need to make everything much better.
While we have a complete design for the game and the technical basis is stable (except for the odd bug), there is still a lot of work to be done. Here are the largest chunks of content still missing. Making them will occupy us until autumn:
More levels: The demo features the first 3 out of 6 levels. The design is finished and later levels have been tested internally but we will only make them available in the finished game.
Progression mode: While the modifiers that change your experience of the levels are the way we will structure the progression through the single player campaign, we will change how you unlock the full deck so the overall experience is revealed more gradually.
More content: There is still a backlog of about 30 tiles and 5 modifiers that we want to implement before shipping the game. We will remove some tiles in return.
Better opening cinematic: Setting the scene with a little intro sequence is nice but the current one is a bit too clumsy. It's the first time we make one, so it will need a few more iterations before we are happy with it.
Graphics and animations: There are a lot of tiles that have too little feedback and we're slowly adding more animations, sound effects, and visualisations to the game as we go along.
Platform support: We are working on cloud-syncing, gamepad controls, SteamDeck compliance and other features that make sure the game runs as great as it should on your device.
Convenience: We've implemented saving ... but loading is still a bit too unreliable to make it available to all players. We will eventually have a much more convenient game, though.
Additional languages: We are currently only translating the game to my mother language German but eventually we will bring it to a lot more languages. The infrastructure is there but the names of things should be a bit more final and the game should be as finished as possible when we take it to the translators.
There's a ton of other features on my backlog: move the analytics backend to something more convenient, boss phases, achievements, and an end sequence, are some of them. We'll tackle them along the way.
We're happy for everyone who joins us on this journey. This is the best game I've ever worked on and I'm super excited to see the many players who enjoy Sparrow Warfare.