Let's talk about long-term plans.

Last week, I released the first public demo. From here, I'm in a good place to build large amounts of content quickly, but I'll be breaking the remaining work down into some major content milestones.

(Everything here is subject to change, by the way! We're in the early days yet.)

The goal of early development was always to hold back on content production in order to have core systems and the fundamentals in place, to have a firm foundation to build on. Following that, the demo is focused mostly on exploration of one starter zone with a limited number of enemies, and only one boss and one ability. Subsequent major releases are going to heavily prioritize content now that both the underlying systems and a rapid content development workflow have been proven out.

There will be minor releases in the interim, including test builds of any new gameplay features.

TL;DR? Here's where we're at now, vs what lies ahead.

...and here's how big the world's going to get:

Where next from here

Each of the above major milestones represents another several hours of playable content. I don't have a great way of estimating playtime, but if we call the demo a 20-minute experience (give or take depending on thoroughness of exploration), the final game looks something like... 9-11 hours.

Which is a lot. I'm probably overcommiting myself (at least, while I'm only a part-time dev). So for the time being, I'm only going to look ahead to the immediate next milestone. That should still be some months of work, since my plans involve three more 'exploration' type zones with hidden challenges and NPCs, actually populating Peanut Village, three more 'challenge' zones with more intense linear challenges, building several more bosses and many enemies, the last few core systems, and whatever neat stuff I think of along the way because that's how the design process has been so far. Hey, it's a passion project; I'm not totally immune to scope creep.

Have I mention this is a non-linear exploration game? You'll need to have beaten any one of three bosses to access the Academy, and beaten any three bosses total to access the 'end point' of the next milestone, so testing's going to get tougher - I can't ensure a player has a certain ability set at any point past the Junk Heap, so I'll be designing content that might swing too hard or too easy depending on the player. The plan is to avoid gating content by abilities found entirely when possible, so I'll have to try and address it by making it clear in-game when an area looks to be much easier if you have a certain ability - without actually preventing you from tackling it.

I'm going to need to do a lot more playtesting now that I'm adding more abilities in, and there's been some interest in a Discord server, so stay tuned. Thinking of looking into that next week.

All right, that's it for now. Thanks for reading!