It's Game News time. We are now a year on from the beginning of regularly scheduled news updates. Here is what we have to announce:
New Architects
We are once again seeking new Architects. We are currently seeking four (4) 2D Minigame Architects. See this previous announcement for where to apply and some other details.
We will be reviewing applications in the order we receive them. All previous applicants who did not receive a response last round should expect a response within the coming weeks.
Alpha Updates
Barring any exceptional circumstances, there will be no updates to the live Alpha between this announcement and the next on January 12th, 2025. With our focus being entirely on the needed reworks, non-critical fixes to the Alpha would draw away focus that is needed elsewhere. We have also internally made significant breaking changes, which would increase the difficulty of bringing changes to the current Alpha.
We do not believe that any of the changes will be in a stable state by that point in time, which is why we are making this decision. We will follow up in the next announcement with how we see updates progressing.
Current Focus Areas
Our current focus right now is on some critical areas that we need to make significant progress in. When these areas get completed, we expect for the pace of development to increase.
Importing Worlds
One of our critical goals for the reworks to ensure that our worlds are both internally consistent and faithful to the original game. Towards that goal, we have been working to customize and improve an existing set of code to import worlds like the CWA worlds into Unity. This work has been making good progress in recent weeks, and we should soon be able to start using it for gameplay development and testing.
Characters
Our work on characters first started with ensuring we had the correct animation weights and data. Once we could guarantee that player models would animate correctly without gaps, we moved on to working on the systems to support player customization. Our next focus for characters will be the movement system and the camera system.
UI Uplift Initiative
Previously, we announced we were working on the UI Uplift Initiative. We have made good progress on this, uplifting various UI Elements and systems. However, we did not reach a point in the initiative where we felt we had the right content to make a separate announcement about. This is still ongoing, though its priority has shifted and will continue to shift as circumstances need.
Closing Thoughts
Right now, our focus is working on these critical blocking tasks. Clearing these blockers will allow for more to be worked on, and increase how much can be worked on at once. A lot of this work is still behind the scenes, so we hope to be able to "show off" something more exciting in the next regular announcement.