Post The Wastes, Platforms, Languages
We're still busy working on The Wastes, however I'd like to share some insight about what we'd like to do next.
Translators have approached us, primarily to do translations that require a cryllic character set, at this time that's not doable for us to implement because we're using bitmap fonts, but we'll cooperate with them to get it done after the release. I've designed the game with lcoalization in mind. You can already go in and translate most of the strings affecting the game. The big challenge is to create a charset for them that fits in visually.
Singleplayer:
Not going to happen. I'm sorry, but that was never a priority to begin with. We'll have bots that you can play against that'll hopefully give you a good idea of what it is like to play against real players. We had some ideas about the gameplay if it had a Singleplayer option which we'd like to share after the release. Maybe a team of modders will take it up to themselves to implement it all and come up with a good story.
Platforms:
I'm mainly developing on Slackware64 14.2 (that's Linux) and doing Windows builds with mingw using a bootstrapped Debian. While I've been using this platform for god knows how long, I don't think it'll change anytime soon. However, for the next project I am seriously considering running on a more older platform.
As a game developer who grew up with games right when NT4 was the development platform of choice and 3D graphics accelerators were becoming the thing, I want to experience ALL of that. I want to learn what it is like to suffer through DirectDraw, DIBs and GL drivers that are all over the place. Hopefully, I will gain experience that could otherwise not be obtained anymore, while making sure the game runs on the widest range of hardware imaginable. This will sound silly to all those veterans that had to suffer through it and now can lean back and enjoy their automated toolchains and a life without CVS... but I've already seen that side of software development.
Qreate:
1.0 will drop this year, hopefully. Code wise I am ready - but since this is going to be the final release I want everything to be perfect. I'm also waiting on a map someone is making - which will replace the ill-fated hub map.
I'll probably update the moddb page for it first.
About .plan updates:
I'm writing these more for myself than anything. It'll be amazing to look back years from now and see what my young mind was thinking. I'll probably cringe at whatever 22 year old me was writing... but who cares. You only live once.
--Marco