Hello all! Today is Vectorio's one-year anniversary since launch! A lot has changed in the last year, and I can't believe how far the game has come. Unfortunately, this post is probably going to disappoint some people as I don't have much to show in terms of progress since the last update, but I still wanted to go over where the game is at, and why things are taking so long.

Where is Update 4!?

I thought I'd get right to the point as this is probably what most people are wondering, and unfortunately once again I have greatly miss predicted when the update would be done. This is for many reasons, with one of the obvious ones being that I've been working on Neon Sundown a lot in the last month (as well as university), but it's not the only reason. Firstly, networking has been a huge pain to get ironed out. I've had to once again take down most of what I had previously written and start building it back up again. This is now the third time I'm having to go in and scrap a major part of the game, and although part of it is from inexperience with networking, the biggest part is that parts of the core game are still a mess. The refactor in Update 3 did solve a lot of issues with this, but I'm noticing that there are still some severe underlying problems that exist that make things such as networking and creating new content a seriously long-winded and difficult process. Now I'm sure some of you are probably wondering why this wasn't done properly in the first place, and it goes back to the fact that Vectorio was the first project I ever made in Unity. A lot of the core game was built while I was learning the ins and outs of the game engine, and so even with the U3 refactor the actual design of the game from a lower level standpoint is flawed. No matter how long or how many times I refactor the game, it's not going to fix this issue. So with that being said, I see three main options to pursue...

• Option One) The first option is to just scrap the game and move on. This is obviously a stupid option, as I think Vectorio still has a lot of room to grow and be an extremely successful game, so this one is already automatically crossed off for me (in case anyone was worried about it)
• Option Two) Accept there's underlying issues with the game and online, and move on with content updates. This seems like an adequate option to go with, but long-term I also see this possibly causing issues, especially once the game is out of early access.
• Option Three) Refactor what I can with networking so that online is stable enough where disconnects aren't happening frequently, and then move on with content updates. Although some parts of the game will never be perfect, I feel this is the most reasonable path.

Although this isn't the most ideal solution, I believe it's the best I can do with what I have. In hindsight, I wish I had played around with other projects while learning Unity first before creating Vectorio, but than again I never expected Vectorio to gain as much traction as it did. I thought maybe a couple hundred people would play it at most, and then I'd move on. But obviously it's been quite the opposite!

So when is the next update?

I think moving forward doing larger updates are not as viable for me. I'm already seeing great success with doing incremental updates with Neon Sundown using an agile development model, and so I'd like to apply that to Vectorio. I think step one is to finish refactoring Networking, and get it out ASAP so we can start getting some movement back into the game. (This would also include some of the interface redesigns you may have seen in previous posts) After that, I can incrementally bring out the rest of what was planned for Update 4, including the final version of the research system and the re-introduction of enemy outposts. In regards to when this will be, I have no idea. I'm done giving out dates for when updates will be finished. They'll be out when they're ready, and I think that's all I'm going to say from here on out when asked. Putting out specific dates stresses me out, and it's unfair to all of you who are expecting something big to drop (like today) and than nothing happens. This was definitely a mistake on my part, and so I'll use this as a learning experience and make sure it doesn't happen again in the future If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please let me know! I will do my best to respond to all of them. Thanks for reading, ~ Ben

[ 2022-03-22 22:46:35 CET ] [ Original post ]