Well despite the last post saying that it would take a week for me to have a post, life found a way to get busy as per usual which is why this ended up getting delayed a few weeks.

I felt like it would be appropriate to talk about some short thoughts on how long this game would take and my plan for it for this year in this post. That way in X years I can look back and actually see how far I've come. Who knows, maybe I'll be faster than I expected, or maybe it'll take longer than anticipated!

Either way my estimate is that this game would take at least a few more (read 2-3) years to really be in a mostly complete state. The issue is mainly the fact that I work a 9-5 programming job which drains me of energy quite often, still have a life balance to maintain with relationships and taking care of myself, and the fact that I'm a solo dev doing this mostly as a hobby. With no clear schedule for when I work on this due to how much life can fluctuate per week I'm sure where you could see how progress is slow. That being said however, I do want to attempt to try and have a decent flow established for working on this game by the time summer rolls around because I do want to release an early alpha by the end of the year. The reasoning behind that would be so that way I have a tangible way to see how much I've progressed and to see what some first impressions are for this idea. That means at very least I need to have a very simple gameplay loop that would involve...

1.Multiplayer to some degree (the required code is implemented, but I need to make sure things like syncing works and how multiple game locations are handled)

2. Being able to have a simple evaluation system for artifacts. (Also implemented, but I need to do things like the actual tallying of said artifacts)

3. A few simple locations where you can go and collect said artifacts such as bugs, flowers, fossils, fish, etc. This sort of sand box would be more of a "hey, this is the rough idea of what you would be doing" sort of feeling. This wouldn't really include the systems or minigames that would be included later for getting some of these things.

So that's the goal, which while boiled down into three points, can still involve a lot of different pieces of work, especially considering bugs can pop up when programming, and art still needs to be made. I haven't even begun to look into the music production side of this yet so it'll be interesting what will be finished by then,

So far though at least some major systems are roughly 75% or more complete including.
1. A  modding system for adding in new content via c# programming, or via textures/audio/data through content packs.

2. A simple localization system for at least handling new languages. (There still needs to be a lot of passes for actually removing some hard coded strings from menus and such)

3.The code for object interactions has been completed (so placing objects in the world and having them do something interesting.

4. The lighting system, with an attempt at dynamic 2d shadows.

5. A day night cycle with stars, a moon, a sun (which will be more important in a much later update featuring astronomy updates).

6. A custom tile map system that was written from the ground up.

7. A custom json system for editing game content files without having to dig through a massive .txt file essentially which should make things much nicer for future modders.

So while there hasn't been a ton of updates on this blog, there has been a lot of work that has been put into this game into the last year. Hopefully sooner than later I'll finish up some of these last few codding systems and be able to focus more on the actual content for the game for the second half of the year.

Anyways, thanks for reading this update and hopefully next time I'll have some nice screenshots to show. 

Omegasis