At first I wanted to say, that this game has a lot of potential and I hope that if you deliver all that roadmap points, this will become a gem in a vast universe of medicore online sapce sims.
But, at the moment the game is a bit lacking in content, while we have a core module that gets the universe running, it can get boring quite fast.
I wanted to ask, do you have some dates for the roadmap or server resets with new features?
I don’t want to push you into some obligations or exact dates, but if you could share some insights about when we could expect some major updates that might bring the game to next step.
We’re happy to hear you’re enjoying the game so far. I think that, depending on your play style, there is already a lot to do, but it’s true that a lot of content is still missing. We cannot give you exact dates for any of the future releases simply because we don’t know them yet. It’s always difficult to estimate how long each task is going to take, especially with such a small team, so we’d rather not make promises we can’t keep. I can only give you my word that we’re doing our best to deliver everything on the roadmap and everything on our internal backlog (aka “the list”) eventually.
That being said, here are the most concrete things I can tell you right now:
A game world reset is coming within a few weeks, probably no later than early March.
Early Access will start in a few months, at which point the game will go free to play. We expect this to bring in considerably more players. Until then, we will improve upon the existing mechanics and try to get as many additional ones out there as possible.
How far we get really depends on how many fixes and changes are needed until then. We’re wary of adding new things on top while the basic system is still unbalanced and/or the core gameplay loop doesn’t work as well as we want it to.
Many of the items on the roadmap look like they will cause fundamental changes to the core gameplay loop. What’s the motivation to balance the existing game when so many basic aspects seem slated to undergo fundamental changes?
In particular, private trades, taxes, “dominance”, ship building, energy, and land allocation seem pretty much guaranteed to alter the basics of the game.
Private trading and dominance are on our roadmap for the immediate future, so we will be adding content while balancing the existing game! It just takes longer as we’re focusing a lot of our energy on rebalancing and tweaking the core loop.
I don’t want to get into it too much (especially since I’m not a game designer on the project), but it’s a very interesting topic. What constitutes the core loop of a game is, in my opinion, often very, very basic. For Prosperous Universe, it’s buying and selling wares. We’re certainly past the MVP stage at this point, but we’ll still have to make sure to keep working at the core to have something strong to build upon. Extra Credits explained it well using Super Mario as an example. (01:09-2:26) If buying and selling doesn’t work well enough yet, things like ship building and energy won’t change that. Which is not to say that we’re not working on both fronts.
I think that, depending on your play style, there is already a lot to do, but it’s true that a lot of content is still missing. We cannot give you exact dates for any of the future releases simply because we don’t know them yet. It’s always difficult to estimate how long each task is going to take, especially with such a small team, so we’d rather not make promises we can’t keep. I can only give you my word that we’re doing our best to deliver everything on the roadmap and everything on our internal backlog (aka “the list”) eventually.