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Unity and Beyond
#1
Hey folks,

Been a little while since I posted a development blog, since I've mostly just discussed things in chat/testing, but I felt it was time to give a more appropriate timeline and intention for where I anticipate the game going moving forward for 2018.


Unity
We are tying a lot of features right now with the new larger integer system to sustain insanely large numbers within the client. This was already done for flash but set us back a fair bit on Unity. That being said it definitely didn't change my intention of having testers on the upcoming public test build. 

We anticipate multiple weekly test builds with all three of us (Myself, Jay & Kay) working on the Unity side of things. Your participation and feedback will definitely help us get things moving along in a direction to get a base live build ready.

There will be several smaller systems that are not part of the testing yet that we'll be delegating among the team while focusing on the bigger areas.

We are about a week behind the test builds (Intended for october 1st) as Kay is likely undergoing eye surgery but things are still progressing well enough.

Base Live Build
I expect this to happen by November, where we move the webGL build from testing servers, over to live....where we'll have a transitional process between flash & unity.

Goodbye Flash
A generous death-date of the flash version that will likely never be touched again is the new year.
I HAVE BEEN ASKED: Nothing will happen to your character data. It is stored on the servers, not on the client!

Stand-Alone
We are anticipating a standalone version. This will be a very rough build initially, and we'll likely include that well before the new year to get feedback and testing on it.
The goal will be to tie into notification systems within desktop-OSes between Mac and Windows, to allow you to be offline but have the option to receive notifications on things like "Club Claim is Ready!" to truly design a new stand-alone experience for an idle game.

We will be tackling download-management Portals such as steam once we are 100% comfortable with the stability of it. I'll definitely be asking the help of the community for helping get it Greenlit as we are no longer partnered with Gamestop for this part of the publishing. I am confident we'd make it through; I'm not 100% confident how steam community would take this kind of game but that is always the risk.

Mobile
We will also be tackling android testing very very shortly after the webgl testing. This will be a drawn out process as mobile publishing is nothing like web, and a little more complicated than stand-alone due to Google/Apple updating processing that we'll have to adjust our workflow to.





Flash Finalization
The sooner this happens, the sooner Unity becomes the full focus and speeds up the feature list.

Here are the items I will be tackling immediately:
  • Ability to respec ships
  • Woodcutting expansion. We have 70 trees ready...from 40.
  • Balancing ships & expeditions. They got a little out of control beyond our expectations without softcaps.
  • Mining Depth Increase & Diamond accrual changes on repeats
  • Mining NRG cost changes
  • Online Claim stacking improvements
  • Match 3 retro energy claim improvements
  • Y Upgrade & shield balancing (currently a maybe)
  • Small QoL stuff
I will be making small adjustments still with flash during the transition, but we will not be focusing on it, and major improvements/changes will start to occur within the Unity version since full support and maintaining two drastically different clients is hell.


Event System Changes
One thing that will probably occur unless a miracle occurs and the Unity version is 1000% live-ready before Halloween, is experimentation on a challenge-based event system.

We will be running a temporary halloween-themed challenge that will have growing difficulty and rewards. I'll be having this within test at some point and we'll work through the feedback on how we can use this setup for future events by offering unique rewards similar to the original events well before the mini-games.

The existing candy/halloween event would likely run parallel, since these will be experiments on working over things for the future.


Notes
We have several systems that are basically planned and ready to go, but we'll be integrating them within Unity, since there will be 3 of us able to do so.

Flash was always a pain because I was the only one who could work on it, and I'm by far no UI designer. That being said, with 3 of us able to work on the front-end, and two on the server-side, we will able to give a better flow of progress and updates.

I'll fill you folks in on a lot more as we get further into Unity.


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