Devlog #28 - Recap and Plan for 2025

Hi together and welcome to the next devlog!

A fantastic year 2024 came to an end. Let me give you a small rundown what happened the last couple of months and why 2025 will be an even more fantastic year for The First Explorers!

About the last three months

The last couple of months were pretty exciting, both fo me personally, but also for TFE.

I've become a dad in October and went on parental leave for two months until December. Needless to say, that I shifted all of my time to my new family during this period :)

During that time, while have a short break from the development of TFE, I thought a bit about the current state of the development and decided to get into a more high level view as soon as I was back from parental leave.

So after that period, I stepped out of being knees deep in the development hole and spend some time on further structuring the whole content planned for the game.

I wrote down every single game design element, all the needed game assets, etc. to help me understand which mechanic makes sense to end up in the Early Access version and which makes more sense for later, building up to the 1.0 release. This was a tedious task, but it was totally worth it and now I have a even better, more concise picture of the scope and the time needed for different aspects of the game.

While being in a bit of a spring cleaning vibe already I also started refactoring code, that I wrote when I started developing TFE. In the course of developing a game, it's important to revisit some old stuff to make it more robust and cleaner with increased experience level. This reduces technical debt in the long run and is a lessons learned from being a software engineer in my main job.

I'm super thrilled to tackle all the outstanding development tasks to form the game experience I have planned for all of you!

So let's take a look at the plan for 2025.

Plan for 2025

Playtest

Let's make it quick: If you're looking forward to a playtest, I have good news for you.

I plan to run a closed playtest with a limited amount of people in the first half of the year. Until then, I'll double down on implementing core mechanics, so that I can get a better feeling how the core gameplay mechanics work together. Make sure to have an eye on all the announcement channels, especially on discord;)

Development Summary

To get you all more in the loop what's currently going on in the development of TFE, I will post a short development summary every month on discord.

This will be a bulletpoint list of stuff I achieved each month and will look a bit like this:

More Time for TFE

Furthermore, I decided to shift gears and to invest even more time into The First Explorers.

Starting on the 1st of April 2025 I will reduce the working time for my main job to only 3 days a week. That means that I can dedicate two complete days to TFE then. This is a huge thing for me.

But that also means that I'm contributing in advance and go the more risky route, since I need to invest more of my savings to handle the living expenses.

Which brings me directly to my last point of this Devlog: I'm upgrading the Patreon benefits to give you more incentives to support my journey, if you like to :)

Patreon Level Updates

The available levels won't change, but their benefits will be upgraded. Here is a rundown what each level will entail, starting now:

Centurio Level

• Discord Role Centurio

• Your name in the game credits under "Patreon Supporters"

Praefectus Level

• Discord Role Praefectus

• Your name in the game credits under "Super Patreon Supporters"

• Access to the VIP Gameprogress Channel on discord

• Upcoming devlogs are shared two days earlier compared to public release

• Regular WIP updates like screenshots, what I'm currently working on, etc. are shared there

Tribunus Level

• Discord Role Tribunus

• Your name in the game credits under "Legendary Patreon Supporters"

• Access to the VIP Gameprogress Channel on discord

• Upcoming devlogs are shared two days earlier compared to public release

• Regular WIP updates like screenshots, what I'm currently working on, etc. are shared there

Patreon is an important mosaic piece of this whole endeavour and contributes to the fact that I can pursue this working time model.

So make sure to pick your level of choice today to not miss out on these benefits and support the development of TFE big time :)

Last but not least I want to give a huge shoutout to all existing Patreons that are already onboard. You're awesome!

Have a great week and see you soon.

Best, Sebastian