What is the plan ?

Inspired by comment under youtube video:

When will the final version be released?

Past 

TD1 (Tech Demo 1 - which you can download here) was spontaneous release without bigger plan. Like I mentioned in "Tech Demo 1 + Postmortem" whole release was successful even with its issues and relatively small amount of people downloading it (at this day 68 people). The most cool think about whole TD1 is that I finally could share my work and hear what you think about it. The most complain was about : Mouse & Keyboard support.

And here good news folks : I finally took care of it and implemented new input system. I also started testing game with gamepad and Mouse & Keyboard to verify that both controls delivering the best experience they could.

Present

Currently I work on TD2 (Tech demo 2) which is a lot different than TD1 because it have theme: "Movement".

Plan is to tackle as much issues related to player control as possible. Bellow list of things that in 99.9% will land in this build:

• Improved movements 
• Better control over character.
• Additional interactions (climbing small obstacles).
• Climbing ladders.
• Elevators and platforms.
• Better Mouse & Keyboard support
• Interaction with environment - levers
• Item placements - Fixed issue where coins sometimes move around when they shouldn't
• Improved animation system - I rebuild way how I handle animations
• Bigger and nicer  level
• And like always a lot of bug fixes and internal tool improvements.

This may look like small amount of improvement but it isn't. Also this is not final list and will probably grown with time.

Another thing that I need to take care of is how to protect myself from breaking any of engine/tools functionality. I'm one guy and it would be wast of time for me to iterate over all of functionality each time I do any update. This is why I will follow example of Unity Technologies and start making more test for my code. This may not sound like a big work but it will consume time from my development. Good thing about this is that when I will have good test coverage it should save me a lot of time.

ETA for TD2 : Middle of October 2017

Future 

Hard to say for sure what will bring future but this is my current plan.

Theme for TD3 will be "Story telling" and it will contain:

• NPC characters
• Story system - records progress of story and make player choices matter
• Dialogues system - you can talk with other characters 
• Quest system - there are quests which may influence story 
• Saving/Loading - game progress

ETA for TD2 : End of December 2017 or Begin of January 2018

Theme for TD4 will be "World in War" and it will contain:

• Enemy NPC with AI
• Melee combat
• Magic ball
• Firearm combat
• Traps
• Breakable objects

ETA for TD2 : April 2018

Ok but this is not everything I will be working on. My plan is to work in background on:

Developing:

• PBR rendering 
• Animation system
• Terrain system
• Movie system
• Sound system
• Music system
• Clouds system
• Particle system
• Decal system
• Gui system
• Unit Tests
• Build system 
• Mac build 
• Converting all resources to new compile system

From more artistic things:

• Modeling characters
• Modeling environment
• Creating both islands
• Improving animations
• Create new postrocesses

There probably few more things but I don't remember them right now. 

So if you ask me when game will be release sadly I still don't know :( But I can say for sure that not this year.

Greg

Update 13 August 2017

Not even month passed from my last post. For me it feel like it was ages ago. Bellow you will find really short summary why :)

Art
Done some work on concept art and sculpting. Generally still a lot of work to do to achieve quality I want to have. But well... life.

Game story 

Around 80-90% of work is done. Finished "syncing" with Little Big Adventure 2. This allow me to noticed few issues with my version of story. I fixed already some of them and what left should be solved soon. Next step will be polishing and we should be ready to move to initial dialogues. 

P.S. I got already to level where I'm able to even logically explain why there are lamps on planet.

Mouse & Keyboard support 

Let's move to next point. Here there is not too much to tell (still considering how to do it).

Animation system improvements

Going slowly but steady :) Right now I'm at a point where I can reproduce almost all stuff from old system and even do a little bit more. Next step: change this prototype in something more polished.

And this is all for this post :) see you next time.

Greg