Dear Therians,
I know, I know, we don't give enough news and it's been a while. But rest assured that we are still here, watching over the servers like we have been for the last, hmm, 14 years or so. We are nearing June 28, the official release date for the French version of the game, so it's a good time to give you an update on what is going on with Therian Saga.
Not much, you think? Well, we may have a few surprises for you.
Our greatest fear is to wake up one morning and find that Silverlight has stopped working, since it's entirely dependent on abandoned Microsoft components. Since our last update, we focused on building a budget from the game's revenues to allow us to eventually make a move.
So... has the time come?
Warning: Technical stuff ahead:
Cost was our biggest problem for porting the game to a game engine (like Godot or Unity), as it would come with A LOT of refactoring. The way these engines operate is fundamentally different from Silverlight's MVVM pattern (with observable collections and bindings mixed with a WCF server AND a socket connection for live notifications, etc., etc., etc.). Meaning, in short, that it would cost us far too much to port, as the client logic and server would basically have to be redone. Technologies "close" to Silverlight that were still alive did not live up to the requirements needed to render the game and be multi-platform.
Every few years we check on the progress of different technologies, and this year, we took a look at the new version of Avalonia UI, a multi-platform evolution of WPF (a framework very close to Silverlight). This platform is now mature and is living up to its promise of being what WPF should have evolved into.
So, we rolled up our sleeves and did a bunch of proofs of concept using this technology, based on the old source code of the game. The results were amazing and have so far given us great confidence that this technology can do it.
This port could be done without changing a single line of code in all our infrastructure and on the server side; communication would stay the same, and the client logic would remain very close to what it was in our original version.
Technical stuff TL/DR: We found a platform that could allow us to port the game for a reasonable price.
Let it be clear that the impact of having a refreshed client goes beyond mere survivability — creating new content for the game will be much easier, and we will now have the possibility to improve the game client.
So what's next?
Even with this new solution and the money from the last few years' revenues, this may not be enough for the port. This summer, we will do our best to evaluate the full cost of the port to the new technology and remove any possible technical roadblocks with prototypes.
Then, this is where the community will come in. We will create a Kickstarter to help us fund the rest of the project. Our players are the only ones who can save the game; we won't have anybody else willing to finance the port of a 14-year-old game. Not all the details are set yet, but I expect we will have a first goal for the conversion, then a list of stretch goals for extras (if you have any requests or ideas for the extras, now is the time to tell us — this is your chance to influence the Kickstarter).
We hope you are as excited as we are about this news; we can't wait to share our progress on the prototypes with you and to show you the Kickstarter page.
It all starts today (well... Monday)!
Thanks for playing!
Virtys