Hey all! TK here- I’m going to give you guys a rough timeline of what’s going to happen with SD. I can’t release too much because some things aren’t set in stone and other things are confidential.
The expected release date isn't something that I can give out, but you can expect it in a few years. I understand that it's really far away but that's what I deem necessary to create a good game.
Let me start with the goals. What am I trying to achieve with SpaceDelta this time?
Greater sense of community
- Not locked inside of IS chat. I want the community to come together and interact with each other more. Features for this are coming in.
- More events: We don’t have enough events. But this time around, we’re coming prepared with many different types of events. Both long and short for all to enjoy.
Great Game Design
- Active gameplay instead of trying to cheat you guys with a terrible economy setup.
- A Better Island: We have so many more features to show you guys that you can play around with on your island. I felt that if you didn’t have an implicit goal in your mind when coming into Skyblock, it can be pretty boring. I’m going to be trying my best to fix that.
Intuitive Design
- Automatic Understanding: The overall goal from the user experience perspective is to make the feature so simple that it’s easy to understand. Now, obviously we can’t do that or else the feature doesn’t work anymore, so we’re trying to find the sweet middleground between design and simplicity.
- Integrated Lore: Instead of 3rd party or shoved down your throat, I want the lore to be scattered throughout the gameplay naturally for players to figure out.
Communication
- A more open line of communication to our players- you! While I don’t think our communication was bad, it can be many levels better. I’ll be committing to having better communication through different means.
Smooth Development Operations
- No more island incidents hopefully. Nothing is more frustrating than having the server itself be buggy. We’ll be testing like crazy to ensure the best possible experience for when we do release.
So what does the development timeline look like?
To give a good explanation, you need to understand the process of development. The basic pipeline of each feature goes like this: concept > white box > design doc > prototype > revise > finalize > build > develop > test > develop > test (you get the gist) > production.
Some parts can be taken out if a feature doesn’t need a physical place to reside, but that’s the basic method. There are some more advanced things that go into each step but that’s boring.
And then you need to do this with about 6-10 features at a time, starting with the most essential things. That’s when we’d be in Alpha. Then we move onto the rest of the features, which is when we’d be in Beta. We’d test this phase until it’s complete for release. This process takes a few years.
I agree, it is really dumb to have a timeline that doesn’t have time markers on it. But that would come later when I can actually confirm things. SD has had a history of not being too accurate with our time estimates so I don’t feel comfortable giving out dates quite yet.
I will, however, be releasing updates and announcements here on the site and on the Discord, so if you would like to stay updated, join our Discord and be notified every time we have new information
In any case, that’s the update. See you soon!
