Hello everyone! We've been chatting about the following changes for the past week on discord so I figured I'd post a nice summery here for those of you who arn't in the channel.
Based on a number of factors which are described in more detail in the page linked below, I've decided to expand the scope of the game I'm ultimately trying to make with this project. A brief overview:
- The total time in Early Access will be around 2 years. This means the game will be officially released some time in late 2020.
- The goal is to ultimately make something of comparable scope to the genre classics i.e. NetHack, Crawl, ADoM etc.
- The core design principles will remain the exact same as before: we're making a bigger game not a different game.
- There will be a transition period with rapid changes and generally a lot of mess in which development will move to an optional test branch, separate from the live version of the game. You will be able to opt into this test branch from the steam client.
- The transition period should take about 2 months after which the game should be stable and balanced enough to be placed back on the live branch and development will then proceed as before but with a significantly expanded foundation, giving us much more room for future growth.
A much more detailed description of the above is available on the following page: Link
Given that this project is now going to be quite a bit larger and more complex I will be regularly updating the above page with more details regarding plans, features, core concepts etc.
I've already gotten quite a bit of work done on the initial transition stuff and so will be getting the test branch setup sometime in the next few days with an initial prototype. This first build will really just be a 'tech demo' of sorts with everything from the current game transferred over onto a large, seamless, scrolling map. Though it won't really be 'playable' per say it should at least give a visual idea of what some of the above document is describing.
From there, development on the test branch should be proceeding extremely quickly over the next 2 months so expect much more regular (though much rougher) updates there.
As always I appreciate any feedback and particularly questions you guys have. In this case questions are even more important since A) I want to make sure I'm explaining everything clearly and B) I need to make sure I'm actually considering everything clearly. I'd like to at least have a vague idea of how 'everything' is going to work at this point before we get to deep into this.