It's been a while since the first blog post, so I figured now is a good time to post an update.

New graphics

As you may have noticed from the new screenshots, I revamped some of the graphics in the game. Terrain should now look a bit less blocky, subtle effects like moving clouds and terrain highlights/shadows were implemented, and the water shader was remade to better fit the pixel art style.

There will likely be another pass of graphics refinements before the first demo is out.

Updated roadmap

While initially I was planning to participate in June's Steam Next Fest with a playable demo, I'm making the difficult decision to postpone it a little bit in order to gather more feedback and have more to time to polish the game. Instead, the new release schedule looks more like this:

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First private playtests to gather early feedback

Public demo release and Steam Next Fest (Date still TBA)

1.0 Launch

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If you'd like to be notified of and participate in the first few playtests, please join our Discord server!

So, about multiplayer...

In order to reduce scope and be able to release the game in a more timely manner, I'm deciding to indefinitely postpone support for multiplayer. It's unfortunate, but while I had a seemingly working solution for multiplayer, handling all edge cases and making sure it's highly reliable would simply take too much additional development time. Good multiplayer is fairly complicated to get right for an RTS game.

Ideally I'd like to add multiplayer some time after the initial release, but I can make no promises there. I'd like to focus on the singleplayer experience first and make sure it's good.

[ 2025-06-06 05:30:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everyone! Steam's RTS Fest just ended a couple of days ago, and it was a pleasure to participate in it as an unreleased game. I figured now it's a good time to post a little update here on Steam about how the game's development has been going and what comes next.

What Is (Mostly) Done

Most of the core mechanics of an RTS game of this type is nearly finished. However, there are still some things to polish and minor bugs to fix. Multiplayer is fully implemented, but still requires some extra work to prevent and deal with desyncs. Pathfinding still needs a couple of last improvements.

Campaign Mode

Campaign Mode is likely the most WIP part of the game right now. I started working on it around 10 days ago and I've been making rapid progress. While Campaign Mode sounds simple on paper, it's different from that of many other RTS games, and actually encompasses a wide range of mechanics. Everything related to items (inventory, equipping them, crafting, etc.) is nearly finished. Then after that I can start focusing more on content and expeditions themselves, which are the equivalent of missions or quests in other games.

ETAs

While it's notoriously incredibly difficult to accurately estimate development time of any game, I hope I can make progress fast enough to publish a public demo around June 2025. You can then expect the initial 1.0 launch a few months after that.

Social Media

Make sure to join our Discord server and follow me on Bluesky to stay tuned for more updates! I might run a pre-demo playtest depending on how things go, but it's not confirmed yet.

[ 2025-01-28 19:13:06 CET ] [ Original post ]