Desert Survival - Dev Status Update

Hello Survivors, It’s been longer than I’d like since our last update post. I have no excuse for keeping quiet so long, but I’ll try to make up for it by being as informative and open as I can and tell you what we are doing and what/when to expect.

Development Status

First, I’d like to be honest with you, and say that I believe we’ve bitten on a bit more than we can chew. We started working on that new project (more info below), one that is very ambitious, and at the same time promised you that we will provide more post-release updates to Judgment. Our new game is turning up much more complex than we expected (so much that we haven’t been able to announce it officially yet), and the update we have in mind for Judgment is taking far longer than we anticipated. This doesn’t mean that our plans changed, only that the timeline is not what we hoped it would be - we still want to provide more free content for our loyal players. Right now our most immediate goal and focus is to get our new game to a position in which we can make an official announcement and start showing our progress. That means enough implemented gameplay and art for a short, preliminary trailer, and then all the branding work, which includes actually choosing a name for the game… A choice that is turning out to be far more complex than we ever imagined! Let us know if you have any cool name ideas for a Tim Burton-inspired city building game with survival elements. Here’s a new piece of concept art (and an old one too), and if you want to hear more about it once information becomes available, you can sign up here (or follow us on twitter / facebook). Steam post image Steam post image Once we are done with that part and make the official announcement, we will prioritize Judgment again and focus on finishing this big update. It will still be a while longer but I’m sure it will be worth the wait. I personally did spend some time working on Judgment code, while the art guys focused on the new game. What I did manage to do in Judgment so far were mostly small fixes/improvements and big infrastructure changes such as those I mention below (game modes support, destructible buildings - that has been abandoned since) and some preliminary desert survival mode changes (more on this mode below) such as map generation. What still needs doing is content creation - designing, implementing and balancing the things that will make the Desert Survival mode unique, all the new artwork, and additional general fixes/improvements.

Game Modes Support

As many of you have probably noticed, any change in the game’s configuration (such as activating/disabling a mod, or changing language) required a restart. Due to lack of experience this being our first game, we made some architectural mistakes early on and a lot of the config data was being cached, making it impossible to “just switch configs”. It was a very boring and exhausting task, but I managed to improve our system so that you can now change configs without having to restart. You can enable/disable mods, and change language from the title screen. You may be asking yourselves why would I go to so much trouble to fix something that is relatively painless? It’s not so bad having to restart when activating mods or changing