Survival Wasteland is not dead, it just was sleeping for a while. Time is limited, but experience grows and thus the Count realized he could do better. The bad news is, all the code has been thrown away, the good news is, with a full restructure, development should prove much more secure error-wise, and progress will probably be made much faster. Plus, adding new features will no longer change the way existing functionality behaves - you only get more stuff, never lose what's already there!
Understandably, there is quite a little work to be done, and once the current functionality is replicated, there will be a new release. Yes, that does mean that in a month or two you will get exactly what you already had, however, you will get it with fine quality, and hopefully with something new inside. However, what really makes it worth is that major additions will be easier to be added - for example saving and loading is to be expected with the new 0.5 or in the 0.6 version.
What does this mean for the future? The long announced Alpha version is gonna get close. NPCs will finally appear, well, maybe just animals at first, but humans too, and soon after this game gets patched up! Combat will not be too far away either. After that I leave it to your imagination, and I'll try to meet what you imagine!
A final good point. The new implementation will make it possible to actually port the game to 3D once there is a point to that. Not to make any promises or anything, but Survival Wasteland is a game envisioned for a long time, and seeing the way things turn out, it looks like the original idea might just be feasible!
Now, so far the whole news post has been somewhat abstract, but we can look at the plan now. After the overhaul is completed, work will start on save/load game and sound. Animation is not a real priority, but eventually it can be expected. Once saving and loading, and sound are added, work will start on the NPCs. After that, when there are mobs, friendly and enemy NPCs in the game, there will be a turn to 3D. Optimistically, the overhaul will finish in a couple of months, Alpha 1.0 will come with the NPCs mid-summer, and the first 3D images should come in the beginning of fall - but possibly as a sequel, after all, moving from retro 2D to 3D is too much of a change to be even a major update.
Stay patient and show support as best you can, find Survival Wasteland on Facebook and give it a like, and watch for any screenshots, news, updates, and eventually releases!
A minor setback... And a major leap ahead!
Survival Wasteland exceeded expectations on some aspects, on some other it failed to meet the promises (mainly animation and sound, that is). However it has reached a point in development where the initial approach hinders the expansion of it's functionality, and thus it has to be rewritten. But no worries, now there is much more experience and what has been done once, can be redone!
Posted by CountNerdula on
