whats planed?

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gurra9811

name is Gustav! at youre serves!
Backer
Beta Tester
i really like dis game alot and i have big hopes for it to be a good one! but i wonder, what is your biggest plans to add in the game? like is ether planed to add later in the game when you guys have come further with it or plans that you are doing right now, what is going on right now in the development?
 

Liam

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
That is a huge question, maybe it would be a good idea to put a regular dev update together so everyone knows what we are doing. I can give you an overview of what is going on right now though.

Over December and for most of January we spent a considerable amount of time running stress tests and optimizing the game. Graphics optimization is not too urgent as it can be dealt with later on, but we had to make core decisions about what exactly ants could and couldn't do (particularly with regard to detecting each other), so that we could finalize the movement algorithms. It wasn't an easy task, but I am happy to say we got the results we were after in the end.

Now we are all working on more visible tasks in the run up to EGX at the end of March, where we expect to have a working demo of the over-ground with a nice level of polish. Matt has switched from deep optimization work to producing assets for the over-ground (insect models, animations, textures, etc.). John has been dealing with the technicalities of ant stats and combat which will help significantly when he comes to balance the new colony-vs-colony levels. He took time out of his schedule this week to put the forum together though; even with a template, it's amazing how fiddly it can get, especially when I am making unreasonable formatting requests. Mike also joined the team this month as our "antbassador" to help us with social media management. It's really helpful to have someone else on the team sharing this responsibility; he has already quelled stress levels in the group from "significant panic" to "general unease". Finally, for me: I have been making changes to the way ants move about (since the optimizations we have had to change the way ants perceive their immediate environment). I am also working on a dynamic music system, which is coming together nicely but has left me with more music to produce than I originally expected. That will go on hold this weekend though as I try to get our first AI colony bot working. If they can collect food and send out soldiers by Sunday night, I will be happy.

The overall objective at the moment is to produce a single player game to a high standard and have that with you as soon as possible. Once we are satisfied that we have done what we set out to do in the original Kickstarter proposal, I sincerely hope that we will be able to keep going. We have lots of ideas that we want to try out, but two things that keep coming up are "simulation / sandbox mode" and multiplayer. We don't want to get ahead of ourselves though, better to make a solid, focused foundation, than tackle a list of ambitious features and risk making a mess.
 

Memige

Tech Lead - Hyperkinetic Studios
Backer
Thanks for the run down :) One bit of caution: I've seen multiple other devs approach a game with the idea of "We're going to make sure the game is solid before we worry about multiplayer" only to discover they ended with a code base and an experience which could not easily be made multiplayer. It's a feature which, even if not implemented during the foundational stage, does need to be accounted for from the foundational stage of the game.
 

MikeSlugDisco

Community Manager
Staff member
Community Manager
I've seen multiple other devs approach a game with the idea of "We're going to make sure the game is solid before we worry about multiplayer" only to discover they ended with a code base and an experience which could not easily be made multiplayer.

There is a large advantage here in that the game is being coded in Unreal 4 which has the client / server relationships set up by nature. On top of that, the way the guys have set up a lot of variables, etc has future multiplayer in mind (but that doesn't mean it's going to be an easy task if / when the time comes!).
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
Memige said:
Thanks for the run down :) One bit of caution: I've seen multiple other devs approach a game with the idea of "We're going to make sure the game is solid before we worry about multiplayer" only to discover they ended with a code base and an experience which could not easily be made multiplayer. It's a feature which, even if not implemented during the foundational stage, does need to be accounted for from the foundational stage of the game.

Regarding this, we have been accounting for it to some extent during development. For example the enemy colonies are "Bots" and could be controlled by a human. It would still be a significant amount of work to properly implement as we would need to decide what variables need to be sent to the server and which can be dealt with by the client along with I am sure a lot of things we have not accounted for.
 

alayyan23

Queen
i really like dis game alot and i have big hopes for it to be a good one! but i wonder, what is your biggest plans to add in the game? like is ether planed to add later in the game when you guys have come further with it or plans that you are doing right now, what is going on right now in the development?
Trust me I'm from the future there will be many new stuff such as tiers
 
Does
That is a huge question, maybe it would be a good idea to put a regular dev update together so everyone knows what we are doing. I can give you an overview of what is going on right now though.

Over December and for most of January we spent a considerable amount of time running stress tests and optimizing the game. Graphics optimization is not too urgent as it can be dealt with later on, but we had to make core decisions about what exactly ants could and couldn't do (particularly with regard to detecting each other), so that we could finalize the movement algorithms. It wasn't an easy task, but I am happy to say we got the results we were after in the end.

Now we are all working on more visible tasks in the run up to EGX at the end of March, where we expect to have a working demo of the over-ground with a nice level of polish. Matt has switched from deep optimization work to producing assets for the over-ground (insect models, animations, textures, etc.). John has been dealing with the technicalities of ant stats and combat which will help significantly when he comes to balance the new colony-vs-colony levels. He took time out of his schedule this week to put the forum together though; even with a template, it's amazing how fiddly it can get, especially when I am making unreasonable formatting requests. Mike also joined the team this month as our "antbassador" to help us with social media management. It's really helpful to have someone else on the team sharing this responsibility; he has already quelled stress levels in the group from "significant panic" to "general unease". Finally, for me: I have been making changes to the way ants move about (since the optimizations we have had to change the way ants perceive their immediate environment). I am also working on a dynamic music system, which is coming together nicely but has left me with more music to produce than I originally expected. That will go on hold this weekend though as I try to get our first AI colony bot working. If they can collect food and send out soldiers by Sunday night, I will be happy.

The overall objective at the moment is to produce a single player game to a high standard and have that with you as soon as possible. Once we are satisfied that we have done what we set out to do in the original Kickstarter proposal, I sincerely hope that we will be able to keep going. We have lots of ideas that we want to try out, but two things that keep coming up are "simulation / sandbox mode" and multiplayer. We don't want to get ahead of ourselves though, better to make a solid, focused foundation, than tackle a list of ambitious features and risk making a mess.
Does this still mean that the fire ant update is coming this 27th.
 

WaffleGuy

Colony
Me neither.
To be honest, I don't think necromancy is bad in general as long as the post is still relevant. In this case I think it is bad because the question was asked long ago and because of that, it got an answer for that specific time, so it would probably have been much better to start a new thread for this specific topic, though I don't think cases like that are much of a problem as long as they don't get in the way of other, relevant threads. This one does though, so in short, I'm not sure I'm a fan of this either. It's still quite fun though.
 
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