It's been a while since we've put together a proper devblog! Since we've got a lot on the go behind the scenes, now seemed like a good time to put one together. We're pretty excited about all of this; let's dive in!
New Areas in Progress
On the art side of things, we've got a few chunky items in progress. As we've already announced, we're in the midst of designing and fleshing out Nirvana, which will be an all-new district that we're super excited about. It will be quite visually distinct from what you've experienced so far in Eden; we're looking forward to sharing some teasers when we're a bit closer to launching this.
However, we've got a little update coming to tide you over in the meantime! We've added several new residential units in the Arcadia tower, found on floors 7 and 8. Matt did a phenomenal job designing and propping these fancy residential suites, which should be going live a bit later this week after some testing.
M-m-m-multiplayer
Right, so... this is a meaty one. We sort of "announced" we were working on this as part of the roadmap we posted on Trello awhile back, without really going into much detail about the hows and whys.
Looking back, multiplayer is something that we've always wanted to be part of the game. We've all got a deep love for exploring and surviving with friends, facing the unknown together, as well as potentially running into hostile players. Earlier in development, we made the decision to focus primarily on the single player experience in order to nail that down fully. Not to say we're "done" with single player as a playstyle now, by any stretch! Rather, we're stable enough to actually entertain the idea of multiplayer options.
From a development perspective, multiplayer implementation gets broken up into 2 distinct steps: getting it to "work", followed by getting it to a point where it adds to the game and doesn't fight with existing systems. Basically what this means is that first we're porting the single player game as it currently exists to support multiplayer, and at that point, through lots and lots of testing, we'll circle back on systems that need tweaking to feel great when played with others.
Once we get far enough with multiplayer, we'll most likely be creating a separate opt-in branch on Steam which you guys can use to test it out in an early state. We don't have an exact ETA on this at the moment; we'll be posting some intermitent updates as we progress and have a better idea when the alpha version will drop.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below! We may put up a Google Forms survey about this as well as some other areas we're looking for feedback in.
What else?
While we push on these new features/areas, balancing tweaks and bugfixes are taking a bit of a backseat. We're still combing the forums, keeping our eyes open and updating our internal trackers, so please keep the feedback and reports coming!
For the time being, we simply anticipate less frequent updates while we lay the massive foundations for multiplayer. That said, we should have a nice patch later this week with the new Arcadia suites and a handful of bug fixes, so definitely watch out for that!