Heya! Thanks for posting this.
Things are still a bit premature for us to be talking about this overly much. Right now we're still in the extended-prototyping phase. For instance, I wouldn't say that there's any resemblance to Risk in any fashion remaining in the game. There are some sensibilities from it that I still maintain, but those are along the same lines of the way that I liken AI War to Chess in some ways. It's extremely non-literal and not something I'd point out in marketing materials (as that would just be baffling to anyone looking at it).
The best way to really describe this game is something along the lines of Civilization meets SimCity meets AI War... somewhat meets Rebuild... meets New Stuff. Risk isn't really in there anymore. The SimCity inspirations and Rebuild inspirations were always part of the design, but have come to the forefront more as early prototypes showed that those were way more fun (and clear GUI-wise) than the initial Risk-based stuff I'd been thinking of.
If you're confused on how there could possibly be no units, think about how there are no units in SimCity, and that will give you some idea. The populace is represented of course, but they are so small that they are not visible on the scale map that you are seeing. Instead it's all about the buildings and infrastructure for them. And of course this game has missiles that can be fired and explode, etc. And we have a variety of just-eye-candy seacraft and aircraft that fly around to give a sense of life and motion, as well as serving as indicators of things that are happening. But their realtime movements from location X to location Y have no bearing on gameplay, which is turn-based.
Timeline at present:
1. Internally we are aiming to have a fully functioning first prototype of everything done by December 1.
-- Right now we are 556 internal svn-checkins in, with many parts of the game implemented, but not the entire horizontal feature set.
2. We don't want to start any sort of public testing right before the holidays, so our current goal for that is mid-January.
-- Between the first full internal prototype and that date, we'd be working on more vertical features/content, as well as refining those areas that are weak, and doing lots of playtesting and broad balance to get things to a sensible place where we can reasonably show it to folks.
3. Final release may slip from April to May, we'll see.
-- The reason for that has nothing to do with this game itself, but rather is related to the AI War and TLF expansions, and all those Linux ports. When we originally set our target date of April, we expected to have a certain amount of time to devote to this game. Compared to our original projections, we're at least two man-months short between Keith and myself; those hours went to other games rather than this one, so between us that's a month each.
-- This game itself is developing beautifully so far, but it's still earlier-in than I had anticipated being at this point simply because we've been distracted by other projects.
-- Having only a single "game" to build here, rather than "two games in one" like TLF is a big help schedule-wise, so we'll see what we reap from that. The combat mode in TLF was the source of all the delays with the 1.0 release of that game.
-- The strategic game here is more robust and in many ways more complex, but one of the things we've been doing during these prototyping periods so far is building out all the really challenging technical components first to make sure that they work and how fast they work. Doing lots of threading for the between-turns AI, for instance, among other things. So far it's going great!
