Debrief
The original plan to have a "soft launch" of this game and scale up the player base slowly completely failed. Believing that games don't become popular without at least a bit of marketing, I thought I was well prepared when the game launched. With a handful of active beta testers, I wasn't aware of any bugs or anything I urgently needed to change, but with a high launch discount 500 players joined on launch day and I had to scramble to keep up with. That said I am of course very happy people are interested in the game.
Besides a ton of bug fixes the most noteworthy changes in the 6 weeks since launch are:
- 5(?) new levels
- A few new components and component changes
- A lot of reordering the level tree
- Faster undo / redo system
- Added level search
- Added WASD to pan
- Added the zoom feature
- Added a new control scheme (click to wire)
- Added key remapping
- Reworked the level save system
- Enabled nested components
- Added 64 bit wires and components
The road ahead
In the near to mid term there are 3 major features I am eager to add to the game.
One of them is allowing players to create and share custom levels. To do this I need to upgrade and document the custom scripting language used for levels. Any levels built in this scripting language can also be scored by the server. At some point I want players to be able to browse a wealth of custom levels in game. These levels will be ordered by up / down votes by default and will have server verified scores.
Another thing I want to add is schematic sharing through the sandbox. Here again I want an in game menu for browsing and sharing projects. I imagine players would create music, little games and so on. Before this I want to rework the screen and the sound component and make them work during fast simulation, as well as enabling 64 bit in the assembler.
And a third thing I want to add is content that deals with deeply pipelined architectures. New components and levels are needed for this, as well as a speed up of simulation.
So if any of that sounds exciting to you, stay tuned!