The Plan

Now I’ve described the game and the current status. Let’s talk about the plan.

Skylands is intended to be a long term personal project so I keep contributing to the same project instead of restarting over and over. I want to release something to gather feedback, creating something in isolation will never be as good as creating in public.

The current release I’m working towards is a ‘dev’ prototype, containing 1 simple production chain, wood, all the buildings needed to produce those products and rather simple islands, targeting Windows via Unity. This will use an early version of voxel art, (see my next post on Art Style), which will look rather rough. No networking, dedicated servers or persistent universe. A very simple UI, with plain colors. This is far below my public release quality bar, a public release should have at least some polish so I will only be releasing this version to my developer friends. This private release will happen before the end of the year.

I plan for the following release to be the first public release, including the same content but with a bit more polish and some non gameplay features (eg auto update, bug reporting). Also including any high importance feedback from the initial release. I will also be making my road map and development tasks public so you can track progress.

Ideally this release will include a professional UI rebuild as I can imagine Skylands UI will grow to be very complex and most city builders have busy, complex UIs. If not in this release then soon after.

After the public release I plan on releasing small and often, ideally releasing an early persistent universe soon after (but without support for a large number of players) and then full self hosted multiplayer options. I will regularly push features and content to single player and self hosted games, and update the Universe on a slower schedule when the content is more stable and complete. Initially the Universe will be reset on every patch, mainly as updating safely and seamlessly is a lot of work, but also most of the content I’m building is for the early game; the late game is a long way off. I also plan to do a ‘Vote for feature’ type system, where you, the players, can vote on the next feature or content I will work on.

I will also be paying for help and features as I go, with the first paid for work being a professional UI rebuild and branding. The UI in any city builder type game is very important and Skylands is no different, I can imagine Skylands UI will grow to be very complex. Art is the other feature I will most likely put money towards, see my following post on Art Style.

Thats the high level plan, much of the specifics and future will be decided by YOU!! Closer to a public release I will have another post explaining my roadmap in more detail and open feature voting.

Thanks again for reading, if you want to get involved please join my Discord.