Roadmap Update!

Hi! It's been a while since I made one of these. 

I shared my 2019 game plan in January, and now that we're half way through the year, I want to take a moment to take a look at our plans, and lay out what I want to do going forward.

In that previous post I laid out a bunch of goals and I'll update the status of them today. 

First -- the successes! 

• The big release "Future Fantasy" launched earlier this year and everybody seems to really enjoy it! 
• I've also continued to release lots of Time Fantasy Icon updates, so I'll call that one a success as well. In fact, after only a few more small additions to round out all the equipment-- we might be nearing the end of those and ready to compile them all into a master icon sheet. Looking forward to that!

Then, the one "failure" that I gotta man up to:

• I've fallen waaaay behind on the promised facesets. The faces are all finished and drawn up-- but now they're in the state where they need lots of individual pixel-level detail cleanup... and they've been in that state for a while now. In all honesty, I've been prioritizing other things over the faces-- stuff like tilesets and character sheets.
  
  I think that it has to do with my comfort zone, and that the faces aren't as easy for me as jamming out new tilesets for you guys. Maybe it's a personal thing I need to work on, to push myself more...
  
  Still-- its not in me to let you down, so even though there has been a big delay--I'm planning on getting back to the faces soon, and they should still be released before the end of the year, hopefully for our big fall release.

Next, the other things that have been changed up a bit:

• I was planning a Pixel Art Book-- I've put that aside.
  
  Why? Because I've seen a few other artists working on something similar. I'm thankful in a way-- others might get competitive about something like this-- but I have so much stuff that I want to do, it frees me up to focus on other things. I wish nothing but success for the other artists working on these books!
  
• I listed Izel's Observatory as a project that I wanted to work on this year. I'm not actively working on it right now-- but I AM working on a game, so I'm just considering this as a little shift in the goal, LOL.
  
  I'm doing all the art for a game called Zookeeper. This is a more realistic project than Izel because I don't have to do any of the programming; I'm part of a team. We've been working on this game all year, and it's starting to shape up. They'll be putting out a trailer soon, so keep your eyes out.

Okay-- but what's next for Time Fantasy?

• Exotic Lands
  I've talked about this one already in this previous update. Right now, the first of the three locations is finished: I finished up the "giant tree" interior and exterior tilesets last week. I'll be starting on the "atlantis" set soon!
  
• Icons and Faces
  These are addressed above. After Exotic Lands is finished, I'll prioritize these. They should be finished up before the year is over.
  
• Unity Optimization
  This is a project that a friend has been helping me with. He's familiar with Unity, so we've gone through all the existing Time Fantasy releases and setting them up in unity with properly-formatted animation controllers, etc.  This is a massive (and necessary) update for Unity users. And then from there we'll have a proper updated Time Fantasy listing on the Unity store (the current one is outdated and it only has the original base packs).
  
  This also leads into a massive "ultimate" Time Fantasy pack update that I've been talking about for a long time... which would mostly be about gathering and re-organizing everything that has been released over the years.
  
  Though if you're reading this as a patron, you probably already have everything... which leads to...

Something New

There are two common requests that I get a lot: 1: individual pieces that can be mixed-and-matched or in a character generator; 2: four-directional attack animations for action combat.

For many reasons, I've turned down these requests. The primary one is that Time Fantasy characters just wasn't designed for this sort of thing-- other reasons stem from that. It's not a good fit for the way that the characters are constructed; especially when there are already so many characters made.

But a new set, built from the ground-up-- designed to be versatile, customizable, fit into a character generator-- and with lots of animations for action combat... something that takes into account everything that I have learned and grown since beginning the Time Fantasy project, a different look for characters but could still fit in stylistically with the existing TF tilesets...

...now THAT is something worth thinking about!

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I'll be back later this week with something new from the patron request thread. See you then.

And remember you can join the discord chat server via this link:  discord.gg/PrDZqnK  

Thanks!