Today, we want to share with you what we have in mind for the future of the game. What the game will and won't be. We are dedicated to bringing our vision to life, and even tough the Early Access launch was a great success for us, we are determined to complete the game and give players an 1.0 within a reasonnable time period.
Do something simple, do it well
One of our main objective is to respect people who trusted us by purchasing the game in Early Access. We want to prove Early Access can work, rewarding people who supported our studio. We don’t want to overpromise without delivering, we know what we are capable of and what we are not. So we won't make big promises we won't keep. We want to do something simple, but do it very well.
The team will remain fairly small, and the scope of the game won't become too crazy, the price will reflect this by staying relatively low. If you followed the development untill the release of EA, you know this allowed us to create great content fairly quickly while listening to the community feedback.
Our vision for the game
We are thrilled that the game receive a incredible rating of 95% Overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam, meaning that you, the players, are really understanding what we are doing with the game. Let just say that if you like the game already, you'll like it even more at 1.0. That's the reason we share a demo with more than 3 hours of content, so players can know if the game is for them, or not.
We want the final game to be:
- a 30h to 60h relaxing experience about terraforming a planet,
- where players see it evolves while exploring a big map,
- discovering secrets and the story of the planet,
- taking inspiration in real science, but without being hyper realistic
- with replayability options for people who want to enjoy it multiple times
Updates
We will regularly add updates during the early access period, we don't have an exact planning to share yet, but here is what is garanteed to be in the 1.0 version :
- A way bigger map, at least 50% bigger
- One vehicle
- A complete story arc and some procedural story elements
- Terraforming stages: Breathable atmosphere / Insects / Fishes / Amphibians
- More environmental threats
- Replayability options
- QoL elements and optimization
What won't be in the game
As we are a small indie studio, we won't make the next AAA game, so some things, as previously said, will never be in the game:
- Big monsters and aliens, guns, fighting and violence
- Interplanetary roaming, spaceship piloting
- Really complex systems, and completly accurate science
- Realistic and next-gen graphics
Multiplayer and procedural maps
Even tough we know a lot of people want to play Planet Crafter with friends, making a multiplayer game can bring a lot of bugs, instabilities and greatly decrease the overall gameplay. We first want to make sure that the single player experience is perfect before commiting to anything else. If this ever happens it will be after 1.0.
The same is true for procedural generation of the map. We will stick to a handmade map, allowing us to pace the experience of players, their discoveries and keep the map interesting while including the different terraforming stages with great details.
After 1.0 launch
Once our vision for 1.0 is done, we will come back to you with a new plan. We are confident that we'll keep adding content to the game after the 1.0 release and, with the help of the community, we will then work on a new roadmap.
Our goal is to release the 1.0 fairly quickly, between one and two years from now, releasing at least one update every 2-3 months.
So you can expect a big update before the end of may, and several small patches untill then.
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See you soon, and good terraforming!
This post is illustrated with content created by our amazing community! Thank you terraformers!
