A Roadmap for Early Access
Welcome to the briefing, Pilots!
Now that Early Access is officially on, I wanted to share a bit of a Roadmap with everyone.
My goal is to share more details of what I'm planning for the game, what's currently in-progress,
and to give the community the opportunity to weigh in with feedback and ideas. Expect updates to
come every few weeks, possibly more often, depending on how things are moving along. This post is a
big dump of info, but going forward, I'll try to keep them shorter :)
The following 3 sections lay out my basic battle plan:
[h2]Main Story Development[/h2]
[h2]Enhancements after Main Story[/h2]
[h2]Stretch Goals / Long-term Maybes[/h2]
So let's dive into a these sections a bit more. The "Main Story Development" list is pretty straightforward. This is basically: finish the game. I'm personally committed to doing most, if not all of the things in this list. I intend to release each stage in groups of 2-3, making early versions of them available in a testing branch as I go. Stages are the time intensive work: making new art, new enemies, recording sound effects and music (yes, Interface Type Seven is also my project). Each stage usually takes a few weeks of experimenting and testing just to get a feel for how playable and fun it is. As I reach that point, I'll probably share it in the testing branch to get some feedback. After that, creating the music/fx, getting the boss dynamics right, and constantly rebalancing as I test each difficulty level, takes another couple of weeks. I'm currently working on Stage 4.
Once I have the next batch of stages (4-6) ready, I plan to take a pause from jamming on that to work out some new weapons upgrades and do some polish on things like Achievement artwork. This gives me time to observe how the new stages are being received, and allows the creative juices to replenish.
Work on Stages 7-9 and 10-?? will follow. I don't know exactly how many stages there will be, as I don't know the end of the story yet. I originally figured around a dozen total stages, but I'm not sure. I'd also like to have a few surprises and Easter Eggs.
Once the main story list is knocked out, that's when I'll start looking more closely at the "Enhancements after Main Story" section. I think the "Random Skirmishes" idea would introduce a fun, infinitely replayable aspect to the game. I'm not committing to anything that ends up on this list. When and if I do, it won't be until after I've delivered the full story experience.
Lastly, in the "Stretch/Maybes" list, I've got the biggest non-commitment of all: Opening up support for custom stages. I spent a lot of upfront time creating a specialized syntax for stage design. I call it "StageScript", and it is how I build out the stages today. I'm constantly tweaking and improving it, and I think it's pretty fun to create stages with. By the time I'm done with the game, it should be fairly easy to open up the testing features I've developed to the community. I really just need to document it, provide some examples, and publish a directory to drop StageScript files into. Additional work would be to create some kind of interface to load them from inside the game, ala the "Stage Select" menu. Another consideration would be integrating it all with Steam Workshop and dealing with moderating shared stages, as well as building out that interface. That sounds like a fair bit of work, so I'm not sure.
[h2]In Conclusion[/h2]
That wraps up my goals as they stand today. Of course, this is all impacted by unforseens: your feedback and killer suggestions, as well as supporting any bugs and issues. Also not highlighted, are iterative improvements I'll work in as I go. Things like UI polish, tweaks to stages for balancing, new menus, etc.
[h2]How Changes are Published[/h2]
I'll throw a few notes about how I plan to release updates:
For reference, the game version is always included in 2 spots: on the main menu in the bottom right corner, and in the Debug Menu (F3) when playing a stage. When I post updates about new versions, I'll include it in the post with a summary list of changes. It should look something like: V0.2.10.1-EARLY_ACCESS
If you read this far, awesome, thanks for your interest!
Cheers,
John
Now that Early Access is officially on, I wanted to share a bit of a Roadmap with everyone.
My goal is to share more details of what I'm planning for the game, what's currently in-progress,
and to give the community the opportunity to weigh in with feedback and ideas. Expect updates to
come every few weeks, possibly more often, depending on how things are moving along. This post is a
big dump of info, but going forward, I'll try to keep them shorter :)
The following 3 sections lay out my basic battle plan:
[h2]Main Story Development[/h2]
- Design for Stages 4-6
- New enemy types, mechanics, and stage bosses
- Story and Design
- Music
- Sound FX (Bosses, weapons, etc.)
- Testing, testing, testing
- New enemy types, mechanics, and stage bosses
- Add new secondary weapon types (bombs and other kabooms)
- Add new ammo upgrades
- Add new Steam Stats and Achievements
- Update artwork for Steam Achievements
- Development for Stages 7-9
- Development for Stages 10-??
[h2]Enhancements after Main Story[/h2]
- Random Skirmishes play mode: Randomly generated skirmishes from selected options
- Additional Leaderboards: Most kills, ???, your suggestions here.
[h2]Stretch Goals / Long-term Maybes[/h2]
- Custom Stage Design Support
So let's dive into a these sections a bit more. The "Main Story Development" list is pretty straightforward. This is basically: finish the game. I'm personally committed to doing most, if not all of the things in this list. I intend to release each stage in groups of 2-3, making early versions of them available in a testing branch as I go. Stages are the time intensive work: making new art, new enemies, recording sound effects and music (yes, Interface Type Seven is also my project). Each stage usually takes a few weeks of experimenting and testing just to get a feel for how playable and fun it is. As I reach that point, I'll probably share it in the testing branch to get some feedback. After that, creating the music/fx, getting the boss dynamics right, and constantly rebalancing as I test each difficulty level, takes another couple of weeks. I'm currently working on Stage 4.
Once I have the next batch of stages (4-6) ready, I plan to take a pause from jamming on that to work out some new weapons upgrades and do some polish on things like Achievement artwork. This gives me time to observe how the new stages are being received, and allows the creative juices to replenish.
Work on Stages 7-9 and 10-?? will follow. I don't know exactly how many stages there will be, as I don't know the end of the story yet. I originally figured around a dozen total stages, but I'm not sure. I'd also like to have a few surprises and Easter Eggs.
Once the main story list is knocked out, that's when I'll start looking more closely at the "Enhancements after Main Story" section. I think the "Random Skirmishes" idea would introduce a fun, infinitely replayable aspect to the game. I'm not committing to anything that ends up on this list. When and if I do, it won't be until after I've delivered the full story experience.
Lastly, in the "Stretch/Maybes" list, I've got the biggest non-commitment of all: Opening up support for custom stages. I spent a lot of upfront time creating a specialized syntax for stage design. I call it "StageScript", and it is how I build out the stages today. I'm constantly tweaking and improving it, and I think it's pretty fun to create stages with. By the time I'm done with the game, it should be fairly easy to open up the testing features I've developed to the community. I really just need to document it, provide some examples, and publish a directory to drop StageScript files into. Additional work would be to create some kind of interface to load them from inside the game, ala the "Stage Select" menu. Another consideration would be integrating it all with Steam Workshop and dealing with moderating shared stages, as well as building out that interface. That sounds like a fair bit of work, so I'm not sure.
[h2]In Conclusion[/h2]
That wraps up my goals as they stand today. Of course, this is all impacted by unforseens: your feedback and killer suggestions, as well as supporting any bugs and issues. Also not highlighted, are iterative improvements I'll work in as I go. Things like UI polish, tweaks to stages for balancing, new menus, etc.
[h2]How Changes are Published[/h2]
I'll throw a few notes about how I plan to release updates:
- Bug fixes will always take priority. I'll test them and push them out to the default branch ASAP.
- Stage development will trickle in as I feel each one is ready to share. These will get pushed to the "testing" beta branch. Be sure to opt-in to get the earliest access to these. I'll announce those as I go, and include the instructions for how to get at the testing beta branch(es). New features will also go here: things like UI upgrades, new achievements, etc. Once these features are ready and thoroughly tested, they will make their way to the default branch.
- Experiments and Ideas have their own "experiments" beta branch. I suggest opting into this if you're really interested in testing out new features, or if you want to help sort out bugs. I don't recommend keeping this branch active, because it will likely break game play from time to time. By participating in this branch, you may have to clear out local configurations and cache now and then.
For reference, the game version is always included in 2 spots: on the main menu in the bottom right corner, and in the Debug Menu (F3) when playing a stage. When I post updates about new versions, I'll include it in the post with a summary list of changes. It should look something like: V0.2.10.1-EARLY_ACCESS
If you read this far, awesome, thanks for your interest!
Cheers,
John