Fistful of Frags on Steam will be one year old in not much more than 2 months. It was downloaded more than 1 million times. I'll leave for other day some of my thoughts about making a game on the largest online distribution platform for PC. Today I'd like to tell you about the future. What do you expect, what I'd like to do, what's actually feasible.
What do you want
I have received many petitions along this time. Many persons asked for (in no specific order) map/skin workshop, more weapons, cosmetic items or a co-op mode among other things. In other words: more content, specially assets that require a good artist behind.
As things are now, it ain't no easy to release high quality content for free. Most artist out there will try to sell their creations or make their own games rather than working for free. Some content has been added along this time without any profit interest from their creators, but that's it.
What I'd like to do
One of my to priorities is
new player models. Current ones look old and probably make FoF look older than it already is. Not only player models but also better player animations are needed.
I actually have done some tests. The TF2's sniper character was imported and it kinda worked. It felt a lot better as TF2 uses a much improved animation system than ours (which is still based on HL2DM era animations). The idea would be to recreate our 4 player models in a similar style than TF2 but perhaps slightly more realistic. Some animations from TF2 could be reused but lot of new ones would have to be done.
More plans:
Steam inventory items as those that drop in Valve games as CS:GO, DOTA2 or TF2 and you can trade freely. Steam inventory was added recently for any Steam developer to use, however the system is still in early beta so I'm giving it some time before I approach it. What could you expect: weapon skins, scoreboard badges and items that offer minor gameplay side effect.
And finally, farther in the future a
co-operative mode. It has been suggested quite a few times that there should be something along these lines: defend some place from multiple waves of enemies. So it would be kinda like that, but I'd like it to be its own thing with lot of emphasis on melee and novel features as some sort of in-game editor that allows you to design the gameplay flow (where and when waves spawn, their composition, what places to be defended by humans, certain AI cues to make enemies less robotic). So players could choose from different layouts for each map from a Workshop where creators could store their designs directly from the in-game editor. As you may guess, this will take time and can't really promise anything at this time. It just sound interesting to me and wanted to know what do you think.
What's actually feasible.
New player models, new weapons skins, new animations. I don't feel like this will happen as things are now, I simply won't ask anybody to do it for free. I did it in the past before FoF was standalone and barely anyone played it. Times have changed, there's a lot more opportunities for artists out there to work for profit, or for the chance of it at least (create a CS:GO skin and hope to be selected by Valve, for example).
I'm not asking for donations, this is not considered at all. Micro-transactions can't be added as I can't sell anything game related since I don't own a Source engine license, nor I plan to get one since the high fees to be paid. I personally don't see any good solutions.
However, I've been creating a game for mobile platforms. I'll keep working on it and some of the cash it may generate will be spent on FoF. I want to see the plans described above happen, and I think they will eventually. More details will be announced when the right time comes.
A new hope? Source 2.
Valve announced a couple of days ago their successor to Source engine. We barely know any details other than it will be fully featured free game engine and it will allow profit. Therefore, a Fistful of Frags on Source 2 could allow us to do lots of things impossible now as: selling cosmetics, creating a map workshop, or even allowing you to make profit by creating content for us.
Could FoF get ported to Source 2? Wish I could tell you, no idea. If there are tools that allow us to port our code/maps/assets then you can count on it. However this is all speculation, this new engine may not allow easy port at all or simply not worth the time. Time will tell!