This past weekend was a lot of fun for us at Gears of Eden. We got to have a community day where people came on down to our personal Discord (here’s YOUR invite) to hang out, talk about games, and to see development as it happened! It was sort of impromptu with only a few days heads up, but it went really well! Not only did we get to engage with part of our community, but we got to stream and show off the current development state of the game! We’ll do an event day again soon, but you can drop by our Discord server any time to chat with us, and please go follow us on Twitch right now to help us reach the 50 follower affiliate requirement! This weekend was a huge success… in more ways than one.
See, this weekend, we also hit some pretty strong goals on everything we’re currently working on. The updated user interface, the new rover (seen in a playable game build up above), the crafting design… these are all coming together. Which has us thinking. It might be a good time to start thinking more about our Alpha Two release. There’s this side of us that thinks Alpha Two should be this massive, revolutionary improvement, but really that’s only because the first Alpha took a year and a half to come out. We don’t want that to happen again. Quite frankly, we can’t let it happen that way for Alpha Two.
So instead, we set three goals for the next Alpha that are more immediately achievable. The first thing we want to get done is to have the new rover fully modeled, textured, and animated. As of right now, a lot of this goal is already complete! We also want to make sure the user interface is implemented, functional, and if at all possible, pretty. As I write this, we’re looking at what assets we have ready and what we can get finished within a timely manner. We’d love to have the interface looking gorgeous by Alpha Two, but it’s entirely possible that this won’t be the last iteration of it, so we’re willing to make certain concessions here. The last goal that is crucial for Alpha Two is the advanced crafting update. We want to make sure you have a large breadth of craftable items and components to try out when you next step into Gears of Eden, for your enjoyment and for our balancing. Currently, we have the items and their crafting costs all laid out, but these exist in a state of imagined balance. We’re going to spend some time trying to narrow down this progression, but we’re really counting on all of you to help us nail it down!
Our goal is to have all this finished by March, which seems pretty doable for us! But we’re an optimistic team, which means we have a couple of extra goals we hope to include as well. The first (and probably most difficult) of these goals is to implement the visuals for the different upgrade tiers for your rover. Each part will be craftable for you and it’s important to us that you are eventually able to see a physical change in your character as you improve, but we also don’t want this to hold up Alpha Two. It is a pretty big task, after all. We also want to implement a character into the game that gives you a small mission. Nothing crazy, and it should be achievable, but we don’t want to push everything back just because this more involved than we’re expecting.
We’re making a lot of progress, but Alpha 2 is going to be a critical phase for us. Right now, we’re doing all our development at our own costs, with a small team. Once Alpha 2 is out, we’re going to have to find a way to secure some financial backing if we want to finish our demo in a reasonable timeframe. That’s where you come in. We really, really need your help in growing our audience. Please engage with us, and follow us on our various social media accounts to help spread the words to others. Like, comment, share. And, if you’re able, you could always support our endeavors at our donation rewards page, or through Patreon. We literally cannot make this game with you. Thank you so much!
This is going to be so fun! We can’t wait to show you everything we’ve been working on these past few months, and it’ll be a great stamp on this stage of development! If you want to see how we get all this done as we get it done, follow us on Twitter and Facebook for all the latest and greatest news on Gears of Eden. Please be sure to vote for us again on IndieDB, thanks to you we made it to the top 100 finalists, but we need your continued votes to reach that top spot! We are so grateful for your continued support, please do have a wonderful rest of your week.
