Friday Blog 197 - More Qualitative Friday Blogs!

For nearly two hundred weeks now, there has been a Friday Blog every week. We've enjoyed some short holidays, but always prepared a Friday Blog to post at the appropriate date. Sadly, we don't expect to reach the milestone of two hundred continuous, weekly Friday Blogs :(

But for a pretty fun reason! I'm moving to a new place next week. It requires quite a lot of preparation before the move, and I'll have to spend some time doing odd jobs at the new place and setting up a new home office. The Netherlands is still a high-COVID-area with a rather stringent lockdown, and that doesn’t make things any easier. It’ll take some weeks before I’m fully set up again.

Apart from that, there’s also been a significant shift in the update cycle. Since the release of 0.7.0 in 2019, we’ve strived to release an update every couple of months. These updates added Steam Workshop support, UI overhauls, the statistics menu, an inbuilt savegame converter, the ability to trash items, the compass, improved pathfinding, and many other features.

With 0.9.0, that will change. Instead of adding incremental features, we want to add significant new things to the gameplay. We would have loved to do that in a bunch of small updates instead of in one big overhaul that will take a long time to develop. But…

Everything is connected. Monsters are connected to guards. Guards are connected to the tech tree. The tech tree is connected to the ores. The ores are connected to the world generation. Changing the world generation invalidates old worlds and requires people to start new savegames.

Of course, we could do some simple changes to one of these aspects. Add a monster with more HP, and a guard that does more damage. We could have a release like that ready in a couple of days. But that wouldn’t be a substantial improvement, just an iteration of already existing content. There are plenty of impressive mods that have content way better than the simple changes above.

So an interesting, serious update should do more than that, it should add exciting new features. These new features take more time to develop. And when you change one system, you’ll have to look at all connected systems as well. When you eventually get to the point where new savegames are required, it becomes very important to add as many of the other changes you’re interested in that also require new worlds.

Eventually, it leads to massive plans that will overhaul a large part of the game. We would have loved to choose “good, fast and cheap (we’re a small company and can't hire 200 programmers and 3D artists)”, but as they say, you can only pick two. We’ll have to settle for good and ‘cheap’. So 0.9.0 will take a while, and there will be a decent amount of weeks with relatively boring “refactored a system” and “changes some JSONs” style updates. We’re planning to skip the Friday Blog in some of these weeks, and only post when there’s something relatively significant to share, preferably something with a visual impact.

Of course, we’re always available on Discord, and we’ll probably make a separate channel there for “mini-blogs”, small updates on what we’re doing. Let us know what you think of this choice, and we’ll calibrate the amount of blogs based on that!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord