The purpose of these dev blog updates is to answer the question “What are those Defiance people up to ?!?”
I believe in transparency in all aspects of life but especially work.
But THIS week at THIS exact moment in time, I can’t share something Really Big I’ve been working on for months. It all comes to an apogee next week Apr 2nd. (I use the word apogee as a throw back to that great shareware company in the 90’s)
I usually break up the update into sections of initiatives, but I’ll just do a bullet list of stuff going on:
- I think I can test the Rivals build tomorrow.
- We’re having design meetings about the player’s life span and the nature of time. Time is a central pillar of the game concept, but how we implement and express this is what we’re working on
- I’ve put a lot of time into planning how we get to 1.0. I’ve said this on the forums already, but I have a better idea of when the game will be 1.0 than when a particular feature or update will be available. This is related to The Big Thing.
- A fan recently asked if we will be updating the Roadmap. Yes. Based on The Big Thing we need to update it. We know better what the game is, versus last year when we posted the roadmap. As developers we need to listen to the game and you our faithful co-adventurers, on what it needs and how we add to it, not just ploughing through feature lists.
- I can already see the concerned looks and hear the questions “Are you cutting features?” We’re still making the same game and pursuing the same play experience of being a powerful Archmage in a semi-realistic fantasy world, the experience you see represented on the roadmap. It’s more about how we are tackling it. Some features we didn’t think of will need to be added. Some will no longer fit as well as we once thought. Some will be pushed to post 1.0 free updates and some might simply need to be cut. This is game dev.
- We’re having design meetings about map events and how you play through Points of Interest, track monsters, and gather resources.
- We’re ideating the kinds of region problems that can occur and how the player can resolve them in different ways.
- We’re dealing with overlapping vacations of three people which is causing some difficulties to keep everything moving. When 33% of the staff are gone, it’s hard to get things like patches out the door. Phil is back later this week.
Currently in Design
We’re exploring how we can do the town view better in the new UI. I’m thinking a top down view might be better than the 3/4 view we have. When I look at the time and cost of making the 3/4 view look really good, I need to explore other options before deciding.
Here is the concept coming from TTRPG:
Here is a UI wireframe mockup:
I think we can better show variety of locations and scale with this approach. Thoughts?