As I sit and type this, the 7th patch is rolling right towards completion, I realise that my life has rather been turned upside down… I also realise that Twitter is a pisspoor way of disseminating information and people never find the ‘right’ post on the forums; so I thought I’d take a brief moment to give a sort of status report on where things are!
Right now, my main focus is on FortressCraft; I’ve pledged to keep working on it, so long as the sales go over 1,000/day at least 1 day in every 7. Not that I know if that’s true… the sales figures haven’t been updated since the 22nd of November! The patch will go into peer review, latest, on the 12th of December, meaning that, if all goes well, you should all be playing with doors and minecarts, by the end of next week.
I’d love to sit down and write a big post about the future direction of FortressCraft, but every time I do so, I turn out to be wrong. I follow what the community want so much that it massively derails me from my own plans. I think I’m pretty much reaching the end of where Creative can take me; I’d like to consider scripting, allowing some truly innovative creations in the game, but the main thrust is pretty much there now. Copy and paste is *amazing*.
So what next for FortressCraft? Well, for those of you on the Xbox, you’ll (hopefully) be interested in the Fight, Protect, Survive mode (aka FPS). This should introduce the concept of your character existing on a hostile, alien, robotic world. The first steps towards this have been taken now – there’s a pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha of FPS mode in the 1.1 Alpha (the 7th patch I’m taking a quick break from right now) – feedback is massively welcome!
Future plans there include non-infinite resources, cooperative combat, levelling, gear, stats, and the concept of not being able to be ‘safe’; if you have a long term server, you shouldn’t be able to hole up and be safe forever. That’s no fun ;-)
And yes. Multiple worlds. Ladders. Slopes. Auto rebuilding Spleef arenas. I know!
Outside of the Xbox arena, there’s been quite a lot of (silent) movement towards the PC version. OnLive have been massively helpful here, and I (roughly!!!) predict that the OnLive/PC version of FortressCraft should be available early next year. I’ve literally just bought a touchscreen monitor, in order to add touch/multitouch support to FortressCraft. (TL;DR: FortressCraft will run over OnLive, on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone or Android Tablet… hell yeah!)
After that’s been done, hopefully the normal PC version should also come out. Because I’m a massive nerd, I want to support some of the weird and wonderful setups you can get on the PC; this includes EyeFinity support, stereoscopic 3d, head tracking… ooo yeah. :>
So far, the PC version is working, and I’ve happily got the Pure and Split/Second network coder from BlackRock Studios working on the network code for me.
Outside of FortressCraft (I’d hate to be thought of as a one trick pony!), there’s been lots of work on the OnLive version of Steam Heroes. I’ve been using that as a ‘learning platform’ for the OnLive version of FortressCraft, in order to learn about leaderboards, account profiles, achievements, and all the other stuff we don’t get access to on XBLIG.
I’ve also been working on updating one of my older games, known as SkyKids; I’m aiming for a 128 player online, 2d dogfighting game, with 4 players per Xbox. Again, I want to port this to OnLive, once it’s done.
There’s also been some early talkings about using other games within FortressCraft engine; the engine itself is nearly to the point where this is becoming a reality.
One other thing I’ve not done much talking about, outside of the tester’s chat, is the game with the tentative working title of ‘FortressCraft 2d’. This has been a test bed for some far-future features of FortressCraft. I also need to have a game that supports 350 players on a single screen, by the middle of next year; this should be very slow paced, and thus ideal.
I’ve not talked too much about it, partly as it’s so early in development, partly as I don’t even slightly want to have to fight off and defend OMFG RIPPED OFF TERRARIA comments, but also because I don’t have an artist for this game yet. (Are you a good pixel artist? Capable of working on small animated sprites? Dedicated, hardworking, efficient, talented and experience? Pop me an email or a link with your work, maybe I can use you!) But right now the game has a working pipe and flow system, you can move around and mine things
So there we go, a short update as to where we are. I guess I should read this outloud, for the Youtube part of my community (damn I wish everyone was on a single, central system!). Right now, I have a couple of gnarly bugs to fix before this patch can go to review. (Next post : Peer review, XBLA and AAA submissions)
And the entire post without a single mention of Notch *or* Minecraft!
Ah.
No comments:
Post a Comment