The background
If you've followed development closely, you might know that we've been working on a campaign mode to help ease in new players and introduce the game's mechanics at a reasonable pace. My hope was that this would tie the game together for the 1.0 release. This work has been slow going, as I'm not an author, so writing good dialog has been pretty difficult, even though most of the campaign is playable at this point. We've spent downtime polishing the game and adding a couple of small auxiliary mechanics, as seen in the recent trash update.
I've paid particular attention to the fact that some of you are disappointed none of the recent patches have touched the software development/management part of the game. I had written this part of the game off as complete, while the campaign was being developed. I decided to look over our list of "wishes" for this aspect of the game and made a tentative plan to improve it. My conclusion is that it would take at least 6 months and be completely game breaking.
Based on the fact that I wrote "I have a great opportunity to make this game as good as I possibly can" on the Steam store page 10 years ago, and this is our last chance to introduce game breaking changes (so I don't mess up the campaign mode and final 1.0 release), we've decided to move forward with it.
The plan
The overhaul will touch marketing, servers, product "identity", subsidiaries and some smaller game breaking stuff that I've always wanted to add, but I didn't want to break saves.
Everything is subject to change of course and will probably not live up to your expectations, but the rough plan is:
- Completely overhaul pre-marketing and introduce a couple of new mechanics
- Add an extra mechanic to post-marketing, but keep the overall post-marketing process pretty much the same
- Integrate servers better with the core gameplay loop
- Add some very high-level customization to subsidiaries
- Add a couple of things to make software products feel more personal
As always, I will try to make sure the additions don't complicate the game too much. Most of the things we add can be completely ignored, without making the game tougher on easier difficulties.
The TL;DR
We're going on a financially dubious probably 6 month long hiatus to overhaul some core mechanics (marketing, servers and subsidiaries), because it seems like the right thing to do and I enjoy working on this game.
I will keep you updated as progress moves along and we have some actual stuff to show. The new server system is pretty close to done already and the pre-marketing overhaul is well underway.
Finally, I just wanted to give a quick happy 12th year anniversary to development of Software Inc!