Hey all,
Just wanted to give everyone a heads up of what is going on these days.
JuneAs you possibly already know, we're nearing the end of our development cycle on our puzzle game
Tidalis. We're aiming to release that game in the first week of July, which means that we're in the final stretch of finishing the last features and getting everything all polished up to a full shine.
Mostly we're in a good situation for that, but the last month of any project tends to be crazy, and this one is no exception. The amount of small programming work that still has to be done, plus all the various marketing and business stuff, is pretty overwhelming. I feel like it's better than what happened near the end of the cycle for The Zenith Remnant, at least -- and I'm sure it will turn out all right -- but in order to make sure that that project finishes on time and with all the quality it needs, AI War is going to be getting a little less love than usual in June.
We'll still be making updates and such to AI War, but mostly it will be focused on bugfixes, balance fixes, and so on. Not many new features, and Keith is going to be spending about 1/3 the normal amount of development time on AI War, instead devoting the remainder of that time to Tidalis, where it's frankly more needed at the moment. AI War is in a great situation overall right now (a few outstanding things notwithstanding, but we are still working on those), and we've intentionally done a
ton of fan-favorite requests throughout May to give ourselves a bit more breathing room in June.
So this is just fair warning, June is going to see ongoing refinement of stuff in AI War, but not the usual influx of new features. May had a double dose of that (at least), so you guys should live.
JulySo, at the very start of July, in that first week anyway, we're aiming to release the full version of Tidalis. Unlike AI War, this isn't something that's going to need to be updated and refined over such a long period of time. It's more of a self-contained thing, and has a lot of tools for letting players extend it with custom content that can be shared, etc.
So once we release Tidalis, the plan is to hit the ground running on
the conversion of the AI War engine over to Unity (plus having the game debut on OSX), which will become AI War 4.0 by hopefully the end of July or first week or two in August. Concurrently, we'll be working on implementing
the Children of Neinzul micro-expansion for AI War. That will come out officially at the same time as the AI War 4.0 release, and we'll do the usual beta/preorder thing with the expansion during the July period up until it actually releases.
We've also been working on a remastered/upgraded sound track for both AI War and The Zenith Remnant, so hopefully that will also be out as part of the big 4.0 release. Should be pretty exciting times, and the sincere hope is to keep development on all that to a month, month and a half at most. A lot of the Tidalis work we have been doing has also been paving the way for having this AI War stuff happening more fast, which is frankly the only reason that sort of aggressive schedule has any chance of being possible.
August and BeyondSo, in the first week or two of August, that's when the AI War 4.0 / AI War:CON micro-expansion will be coming out. After that, we'll be starting work on our next game, Alden Ridge. That game has already seen 8 months of development, but that code all predates AI War and so doesn't have nearly all the latest and greatest stuff. We're going to be merging it into Unity as well, and substantially altering the game in the process; parts of it worked really well in our alpha versions, other parts I was really frustrated with, so it's going to be somewhat re-imagined based around the parts that worked well (and all the stuff that we've learned since 2008, in essence).
The remainder of the Alden Ridge development cycle is likely to take until the end of the year, or until very early next year. The goal with that project is for it not to be so rushed for the team; and hopefully our team will be a bit larger by the time we are working on that project (assuming that Tidalis does well enough to support that), so that will let us also get more done in the same amount of time without things getting so crazy, etc. After that project is completed, we'll be doing the next full expansion for AI War, so that's looking like it will be in Q2 of next year at best right now -- hence part of our reason for doing a micro-expansion in the meantime.
My goal is to be able to bring Keith on fulltime somewhere in the July to September timeframe, and ideally there are two other fulltime hires that I'd like to make then, also -- we have the individuals all lined up, we just need the income to support them. This is particularly relevant for me because starting in late August or early September, my time is going to be becoming a lot more limited in general, and I'm going to be taking at least 2-3 weeks off from work during that period. I'm going to be becoming a new dad around then, and a lot of the rush this past year (for me) has been to get enough done before that point so that I wouldn't have to devote so much time to Arcen. The goal is for me to be able to be a good dad while also still maintaining Arcen with the same level of attention and speed and so on. And that's going to require staff increases if the speed is going to be maintained, at least, because at the moment I put in too much time to also effectively do the dad thing the way I'd want.
The Bottom LineAnyway, it should all work out, I have a really good feeling about both Tidalis and what we're doing with AI War 4.0 and it's micro-expansion, so I think that all the hard work that's going into those will buy the company some breathing room for a little while, financially speaking. And if we're able to make the staff increases that I want, development shouldn't even slow down if I'm working less crazy hours than now, so that would be particularly great.
One way or another, we'll figure things out as we go, but right now that's the plan! Just wanted to give you all an update, and a heads-up about what is coming for AI War in particular. June is going to be slow for it, then July is going to be absolutely crazy, then we'll be back to normal after that and for another 6-9 months, until the next expansion.
