Hi everyone,
As usual, I am going to take this roughly 4th year interval to give you a broad overview of where the game is at the moment and where it is going over the next year.
What happened this year?
As 0.8 was out on the experimental branch, there was a big focus on bug fixes as bug reports came in, as well as a bunch of quality of life updates that addressed various concerns and suggestions by players. Among them were the introduction of fast travel, sending of seeds in multiplayer, UI improvements, and many more.
Additionally, the past year saw the introduction of wagons, with the pioneer wagon being the starting point for the new village mechanic, and allowing players to establish their new outposts much more easily than before. The runner wagon was also introduced a little later, adding more control over transport for players - though the official transport wagon will add even more to this in the future.
There were also a number of new building models and upgrades to building models added to the game, e.g. the full set of towers to go with the new units, and the way towers more generally worked was changed to them being destroyed by attackers, rather than the attackers having to first shoot the defenders out of their fortifications.
Beyond all of the noticeable upgrades, a lot of changes also occurred in the background, largely relating to the village mechanics that will be properly introduced in 0.9, but for which I needed to at least implement the framework for the pioneer wagon to work. These changes should pay off in easier and more stable development in the future, so you will see them pay off eventually.
Finally, 0.8 was released to the stable branch properly, which was a nice culmination of a rather long development time for what should probably have been more than one huge update.
What is currently planned?
With 0.8 finally done, I will obviously focus on many of the 0.9 aspects I have already mentioned in previous posts. However, the timing of 0.8 having been finished also comes at a point when another very long term project of mine is starting to come to an end (a project I actually started a few years prior to Path to Prosperity). As such, I have decided that I will focus a little more on the other project for the coming months in order to wrap things up with a nice bow, and be able to more quickly return more of my attention to PtP.
What does this mean in practice? For one, I will reshuffle my PtP priorities slightly, and work primarily on the visual component during this time. Creating building models is not as involved as coding new mechanics, and as such, I should be able to do this as a “break” from my other project. The new models will also be easy to throw into the game without having to worry too much about breaking anything major with their addition, so I won’t have to worry about days of bug hunting following these updates. I will try to introduce building upgrades into the game as a mechanic at some point during this time as well, as it will work nicely with the building modelling aspect.
With the development being slightly slower during this time, it will also make more sense to reduce the frequency of these update posts, to avoid intermissions or me not being able to say much. Over the next months, I will therefore post updates whenever I have gotten through enough development to fill a post, which I expect will be roughly every two weeks. Once my other project is finished, I will likely return to the weekly format.
In any case, I will be fully available to receive bug reports and feedback, and will address bugs as a priority as they come up.
Once again, thank you all for your reports, feedback, and suggestions, and for sticking with the game for yet another year!
Until next week!