The next build

Now that the first build can be played by all tiers, there will be a longer period without any updates where we work on everything that will be included in the next build. We'll also work on some more game design aspects, documentation, project organisation and the like to better scope the project timeline and make sure the machinery runs efficiently. Furthermore, we'll be applying for a grant from Epic Games in two weeks and need to prepare the application for that. These non-dev workloads together with the Easter holiday where some people will take time off means there won't be as much progress on the new features in April and the new build needs to ship later than that. I can't give a concrete date yet since we're still planning what to include, but the goal is to have it available before summer.

So what would it (most likely) include? The new dragon for starters, and some early version of the dragon creator, along with a new dragon saddle and hopefully a new armor set for the rider that we'll start working on soon. We'll also aim to include an early version of the battle system (which there will be a sneak peek of next week), improvements to the landscape and world, and possibly some destruction.

The main uncertainty is how smoothly the porting of the flight system for the new dragon goes, a lot of things will change and we wouldn't want to include it until it looks as good or better than the current dragon. If it does end up taking a long time to get right, an alternative is to include two modes, one where you fly around with the legacy dragon like the current build but with the new landscape improvements, battle system, etc, and another mode which is just the dragon creator and testing some ground movement without being able to fly the new dragon (yet).