When we started this new game project a month ago we somewhat jokingly called it Crea. Well, the name has stuck. We have stolen the name from an older project of ours - “We will finish Crea!” I still like the name and it is a good fit.
In other news, I want to share the plans for this blog as well as Crea.
This is obviously a game development blog, but I want it to be more to it than just that. I would like this to be a conduit between us, the devs, and you, the community. Consequently, I’m striving to be as transparent as possible. This means we will be giving somewhat frequent development updates, showing early WIP screenshots, revealing game systems early on and much more. We also want to be able to take feedback and incorporate it into the game.
I am still getting into the swing of regularly posting updates and I have been considering attempting a posting schedule. My current thoughts are that I will do a weekly development update on Monday and on Thursday or Friday do a more lengthy post discussing some aspect of the game in detail. I will even take requests for the in-depth posts.
Now onto the plans for Crea. Back at the start of development we sat down and sketched out a very rough project timeline. We have 5 phases of development planned: Early Alpha, Alpha, Beta, Release, and Post-Release.
- Early Alpha is all about getting the fundamentals down. So it primarily consists of just the basic systems – world generation, saving/loading worlds, world manipulation, multiplayer, crafting, lighting, and a few others. Another week or two and we’ll have all of this done.
- Alpha is when things will start to get more interesting. We will be adding in character creation, character stats, equipment, NPCs, enemies (death included), and refining the systems from early alpha. We are aiming to wrap this up by the end of April. We are being optimistic!
- Beta will be bringing in a wave of great additions. We will begin putting together the mod tool and documentation for adding mods. Also many other exciting things such as adding in weather, animals, and what we are calling “interactive items”. With this being further out it is hard to say how long this will take but we are once again aiming for roughly a one month period – end of May.
- Release will be all about polishing things and getting it ready for the world. If the game is accepted onto Steam then time will be spent implementing some Steam features.
- Post-Release is currently a dumping grounds for ideas that we like but are not vital for release. I imagine that as we move forward this will change a decent amount. Even more so once we start getting some more feedback.
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Sounds like a solid plan! Not sure that I will have time to head the UI department, but I would definitely love to help brainstorm with you on that aspect of the game. After having played Terraria for a bit, the UI seems to be it’s greatest point of failure.