Hello everyone! The day is finally here. I’ve been procrastinating and stressing out about releasing this for over a week now since its basically a giant mess but I figure that ‘giant mess’ is going to be the ongoing theme of this entire transition period so I might as well get it over with now.

Apologies if the following is a bit rambly and incoherent, I'm at that fun stage where I'm exhausted from pushing hard these past few weeks and at the same time, the only thing I want to do right now is keep working at it :P

So first off, lets just reiterate what we’re doing here:

• Given the enormous amount of ideas I have to continue expanding this game (my own and those suggested by you guys), I’ve decided to quite drastically increase the duration of the project and the planned final scope of the game. For an overview of the direction we’l be heading see link
• Early access will continue for another year and a half or so with a tentative final release date some time in late 2020.
• In order to most efficiently work towards this larger final vision of the game, I think its critical that we get a bunch of the major components and changes working as soon as possible so that we have lots of time to work on the details.
• With this in mind, we’l be passing through what I’m calling a ‘transition period’ where I’ll be forking updates to an opt-in beta branch while leaving the default branch as it is.
• The test-branch will be a place of chaos, extreme lack of balance, and hopefully, very rapid development.
• When the transition period is complete i.e. the game is not a complete mess, I’ll merge it back onto the main branch and we’l carry on our merry way.
• I’m expecting this transition period to take about 8 weeks with the goal being to get the game back to its current ‘playable’ state by the end of June with the rough details of the expanded scope filled in.

Transition Period Overview:
The defining plan for this period will be rough, fast, and fluid! I’ll be cutting every possible corner, using placeholders wherever possible, leaving every detail unpolished and just generally focusing completely on the big picture at the expense of the details. I want to be able to add content quickly, move big globs of 'stuff' around, and just generally work at a very high level.

I like to think of this as sketching where you keep everything quick and loose so that you can focus on getting the major ‘gist’ of the whole thing worked out while leaving lots of room for iteration and changes. The goal of this period is to, as quickly as possible, get the major ‘skeleton’ of the whole expanded scope figured out and working. The period will be complete when its possible to start narrowing in and getting into the actual details. With the in mind I have a number of ‘rules’ I’ll be trying to follow during this period:

#1 Completely ignore variety between games, randomness, proc-gen etc. Focus on getting a single, balanced, working example of the world completed. This completely eliminates the hassle of trying to analyse and adjust in the face of constantly shifting proc-gen. It also allows me to very rapidly create content, adjust it, move it around etc. Once a single working world has been achieved, its much more managable to start varying and randomizing the individual elements.

#2 Completely ignore details. Wherever possible, sketch in the bare minimimum required to capture the ‘essential essence’ of a feature, piece of content, region of the game etc. Theres no use going into detail before the big picture is firmly established.

#3 Completely ignore micro balance. Avoid fiddling with stats and trying to get combat balance perfect at all stages of the game. Rather focus on the big picture, macro balance of the game.

#4 Spend a ton of time on quality of life features. This sort of contradicts the points above, but I believe in this case, its absolutely essential to spend a lot of time getting this stuff right. The world is going to be getting very big very fast, and its critical that its easy, intuitive and not annoying to navigate it.
Furthermore, most of the changes really come down to adding a high level strategy layer to the game and in order for this to work, we need a lot of information to be presented clearly in order to make strategic decisions. I don’t want a messy user interface to be obscuring whats actually going on mechanically in the game.

Update 1.28:
To access the test-branch of the game you need to right click on the game name in your steam library and at the bottom of the drop down menu select 'properties'. Then under the 4th, 'Betas' tab enter the password 'secretpassword' and it should give you access to the test-branch. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing it.

This update is essentially a technical proof of concept which includes a lot of the underlying bits of code that will be needed moving forward. Its basically a direct translation of every bit of content, generation, and mechanics that we have so far into a non-linear format with very little adjustment. So obviously this means it doesn’t really ‘work’ as a game yet, but its definitely a solid foundation from which I can now quite rapidly start building so updates to the test-branch should be very frequent moving forward.

To be clear EVERYTHING is basically a placeholder at this point and is subject to drastic change, removal or replacement. I’ve done a ton of design work on paper so I feel like I have a pretty clear picture now of where we’l be going and how I’ll be evolving the game to get there but theres definitely going to be some weird transitory steps along the way that might not make much sense. With future updates I’ll be doing my best to explain my thinking along the way, both to explain what would otherwise be ‘wtf is this?’ moments, and also since you guys have always been super helpful with feedback, suggestions, critiques etc.

For now though, its getting past midnight, and if I don’t finish this announcement quickly I’ll likely just put off this update again. Moving forward though I’m planning on updates very frequently i.e. every day or two, and I’ll be trying to give as much information about whats going into the game, and more importantly why, along the way. Definitely tomorrow I’ll likely have another update along with some more details about the current content and mechanics that have been implemented.

Thanks as always for all of your feedback, suggestions, and support!