Early Access Roadmap

In this post, I'm going to give an overview of everything that's currently planned for Freefall during Early Access, as well as a rough timeline of when all of these features are expected to be implemented. Bear in mind, this roadmap is only an estimation of how the development will go, not necessarily a fixed plan, so please take everything with a grain of salt. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be tidying up a lot of the game engine code and fixing the bugs that have been exposed since the Early Access release. It's important that the game has a strong and stable engine that will pave the way for the development of new features. During this time, most of the updates will be highly technical in nature, so don’t expect many/any new features being added. One big thing I want to investigate quite soon, though, is adding support for Steam OS (Linux). I’ve already done some preliminary testing and this will likely be pretty quick and easy to add. I’d also like to solidify things like achievements and leaderboards at this time. I’m not saying that all (or any) achievements and leaderboards will be implemented during this period, but I’d like to, at the very least, have concrete plans for how both of these will work. In particular, I want to support leaderboards both for standard levels and for custom player-created levels in the future. The first big addition to the game will be a turbo mode, allowing players to fast-forward time, increasing their speed in return for a time bonus. This will require an overhaul of the audio engine to allow time shifting of the music, as well as some way to keep the music always in sync with the current time. At this time, I’d also like to look into ways to generate levels from music automatically. The way I see this working would be for an initial level to be generated from imported music, as a starting point for allowing further customisation by the player to make any tweaks, changes, additions, etc, so I’ll be working on a way to create and share custom player levels at this time too. This next one is a biggie: multiplayer support. The current engine is written in such a way that may make it difficult to implement any multiplayer stuff, so this will probably require quite a significant rewrite of the engine. Right now I’m unclear on how long this could take, but ideally I’d still like to do it. To clarify, I’d like to support both local and online multiplayer, experimenting with both cooperative and competitive gameplay modes. The future? There are a bunch of little features that I’d like to try out at some point during Early Access. I’d like to add Steam VR support at some point. I’d also love to investigate whether or not it’s possible to port the game to iOS, although this is probably less relevant to Steam players. There may be other features and changes that pop up later in development, so I’ll be reviewing this roadmap quite regularly to make sure everything still makes sense, and adjust as needed. I’d like to be clear about something. After the game exits Early Access, I want to continue providing updates. Most of these will be technical in nature (bug fixes, etc), but I’m not just going to abandon the game. Freefall will only transition from Early Access to full release when it feels ‘done’, but if a great new idea comes up some time after that final release, I’ll happily investigate adding it to the game. In the long term, I do intend to use this engine as I work on developing future games. The reason I’m mentioning this now is because I intend to keep engine compatibility with Freefall for the foreseeable future. This means that the game will continue to receive engine updates, benefiting from any performance, stability, and graphical improvements. I hope this has served as a comprehensive outline of Freefall’s current development roadmap, and please don’t hesitate to ask questions in the General Discussions forum on the Community Hub. The whole point of this roadmap is to give an outline, so there are undoubtedly some unanswered questions that I’d be happy to cover in more detail.