Hello everyone,
I am very happy to write you this announcement on this day. Today is the 2 year anniversary of Summer Islands Early Access on Steam.
I didn't think that Summer Islands would be so popular. At the beginning we didn't think that Summer Islands would create a worldwide hype. With the number of daily new games I find it rather surprising that there are already some who have bought the game and have written us feedback and wishes.
I think that's really great and I can't thank you enough for that.
As you know I develop Summer Islands only in my spare time and with your support/feedback/wishes you carry the game 1000%. There were many who thanked me for a childhood memory and there are also some, as I read in the forum/reviews who would rather have a polygon 3D game :D. Yes, that's life. You can't please everyone. But i try the best and who knows what will come in the future.
We were able to implement, improve and fix a lot of things in the last years with your help. Our update cycles we could always keep to a large extent. So there are no fixed times. But in the period of 2-6 weeks we should be able to create something new. We also learned a lot about the general release of a game and marketing. Whereby the marketing always comes too short, with most Indiegames, I would claim. Most of the time we don't have the time and experience for it.
I think our engine is great, especially in agile development, where you want to quickly develop at least small parts of the software. But looking at the big picture, I've invested a lot of time in problem cases like MacOS, Linux or the problem that laptops with external GPU tend to run the game with the CPU instead of the GPU. These are problems that I think you could work around with an engine like Unity or Unreal Engine. But you also need a longer learning curve for that. It all has advantages and disadvantages.
For future planning, we always look at our todo board. There are some bigger items there, e.g. special buildings, auctions, sabotages. But also such things as improved bridges, reputation or other gamemodes, with which one could change the game principle somewhat. The next step is a new edition of the UI/UX.
As you can see there is still some work to do. But the biggest part is already integrated (at least as basic). I now assume that we will be 1 more year or shorter in Early Access, so as a snapshot / rough planning. Maybe there are still some good new ideas or one or the other feature does not fit with the gameplay anymore.
I am always happy about ideas/wishes/criticism (with reasons) to exchange and to increase the fun for you.
In this sense I thank you very much.
Without you this would not have been possible.
Best regards
Matt