We hope everybody had a Merry Christmas or Happy Hanuka or Happy Holidays.
We have just been relaxing and spending time with friends and family since the release of Pre-Alpha 0.0.0011 on Christmas Eve, but let's take a look back at December 2016.
Bugs Smashing
We received a few emails and one forum entry with your feedback about Pre-Alpha 0.0.0010. It really is wonderful to hear from you guys and the bugs we're seeing happen on different hardware configurations and different play styles.
Two things that are very difficult for us to replicate in our testing environments.
Thanks you to everybody who wrote a bug report or provided useful opinions and gameplay suggestions.
Special thanks goes out to Darth Cameroth and Rob. Your feedback has been especially useful and insightful.
Pre-Alpha 0.0.0011
We released a new build based on the 0.0.0010 feedback on Christmas Eve with many bug fixes and a Christmas Theme.
Unfortunately this release was not stable enough to do a wider release so we have only published here
Download Pre-Alpha 0.0.0011 for Windows - Indie DB
Looking Back
2016 has been a good and bad year for us. We've covered a lot of ground and we introduced the Flesh Crafting feature.
This resonated with the community and we always get really good engagement for any content relating to Flesh Crafting.
Of course making this feature work right and creating a deeper inventory system has cost us many months of development time and there is still more to come.
However, there have been some setbacks too like getting Scott access to the project and both of our computers recently crashed and required a complete rebuild.
Thankfully we keep off-site backups and no data was lost.
Looking Forward?
We're still pushing hard to get to Alpha. What we mean by that is simply getting the core features in place and working together seamlessly.
These features don't need to be 100% complete or may lack final polish, but they check the boxes for the gameplay experience we're aiming for.
Once the core systems are in place and we can focus on delivering the full gameplay experience we will start generating new content.
There are only a few milestones left before we can gladly say we're at Alpha
- Open World Streaming - seemless experience within a large level without frame drops and the ability to load the player's progress anywhere in it.
- Minion Command System - Command minions to got to a map location, feast on a corpse, claim a town/fort, perform labour task
- Skill System - Cast spells with special effects, animations, combat effects and cooldowns
There are other small systems that still need work but these are the big ones that inhibit gameplay.
See you all in February and Happy New Year.
You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook for all the latest news, pictures and updates.
You can get involved in the discussion on the Forum or track our progress on Trello.
Watch the latest dev videos and technology demos on YouTube
Thanks for the support
Damian
Sandbox D7 Team
