Dev Diary #3 (Where we're going, where we've been)

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Hi there, fellow ylanders!

 

With the new year just behind the corner it seems like a good time to both look back and talk about what you can expect to see in Ylands in the future.

 

2016 was a good year for Ylands.

We’ve added alchemy (because who wouldn’t want to breath underwater, fly by simply flapping hands or have a ridiculously big head, right?), containers, lots of assets you can use to create a perfect home. We all learned to befriend and ride horses. We have put on lots of different armors and fought our enemies with dozens of weapons - from stone axes to firearms. And speaking of that - we discovered cannons, which are lot of fun as well (depending on which side of it you stand).  Explosives have found their way into our world as well - and so did the traps. “Survive” scenario became “Explore” and along with it we bade adieu to the single biome available in the map and moved towards maps containing anything from freezing arctic to hot desert ylands.

We added the Editor - the tool that we ourselves use to create scenarios for you and that you can use to create your own adventures.

All this, along with dozens of other new, smaller features and over 1500 fixed bugs was the past.

 

If you want to see a great visualisation of what we’ve achieved so far, you’ll love this page https://ylands.com/roadmap

 

What does 2017 hold for us all?

Firstly it needs to be said that although we’ve been actively developing the game for over 2.5 years, in our plans we are pretty much at the very beginning. We think the basics are there (although we’re obviously still polishing, improving and fixing stuff as we go) and that now it’s finally time to... have fun. Since the very beginning we've had a long list of features we would, at some point, like to see in Ylands - it's called Awesome & Crazy. We think it’s time we moved from a still a bit generic sandbox game to something unique. There are features in the list that are not that difficult to implement while others seem almost impossible to pull off at this stage - but that’s fine because we plan to stick around and keep releasing the updates for many years to come.

But let me guess - you’re probably more interested in what’s coming in the next few months, right?

We understand that having working, reliable multiplayer is crucial and we’re doing our best to get there as soon as possible. Right now there are still some issues that stand in our way:

The first one is that under some circumstances (due to specific network configurations, router setup, firewalls etc.) players are not able to see each others' games. We’re trying to fix that together with the makes of our 3rd party networking solution. A way of fixing that would also be having dedicated servers. You should be able to host one of those sometime during February. 

Right now MP doesn't support larger maps (which applies to Explore scenario as well) - this is already being fixed and should be working sometime during late January.

And finally there are still various in-game MP problems like actions and objects not properly synchronised (especially at higher latencies). We should be able to get rid of those before the end of February.

Multiplayer is, indeed, fun, but we want you to get involved in Ylands community even more so in Q1 we will let you share all your creations online (from simple objects to whole adventures). You will be able to browse and search through what others have made and play it / place it in your scenes with ease.

 

 

And what new features will you find in the game itself? Hm, what about humanoid enemies (the old provisional AI is being reworked from the scratch right now) and friendly NPCs? What about way more interesting terrain? Visual improvements and effects? Additional Editor improvements?

Oh, and did we hear you say that you wanted some sort of storyline or to have some goal in Explore scenario? Yes, we too feel that having some more motivation to explore and go to dangerous places (oh yes, those are coming as well) makes a perfect sense so this will get implemented as well.

Also there are several really cool features that others said we should leave as a surprise - but I'm gonna tell you anyway (it's not as if they could do anything about it!)

So, you’ll definitely like [redacted] a lot, as well as [redacted], or, wait for it ...[redacted]! (my favorite, a truly great feature). Sounds awesome, right?

And yes, we're still talking about the first three or four months of 2017. We have some general plans for the rest of the year (like making the game available on Steam - don't worry about us not letting you play that version as well ), but telling you now would feel too vague, spoil all the fun and, yes, we'd rather first deliver what we just promised before making any more promises .

Let me end by saying this - seeing you play and enjoy Ylands and reading your feedback makes working on this game tremendously fun. As long as you stay as classy as you've been so far since the very beginning, together we'll make 2017 the year of Ylands :).

So thank you, guys. Thank you a lot.

 

                    
and everyone else in Bohemia Interactive who helped us making this possible

[Miguel Preguisa 443]

Thank you very much for a great game I'm playing almost a whole year by now. I'm with you 15 updates but I'm still looking forward to more and all of them. Ylands is my favorite game that whole time. 

6 hours ago, Aleš Ulm said:

We plan to stick around and keep releasing the updates for many years to come.

That are going to be great years. 

So thank you, classy developers. Thank you a lot for hours, days, months, (and I hope years) full of fun. 

[Khanecz 79]

Is that cake made out of improvised grenades and eggs? 

Amazing

[Miguel Preguisa 443]

Ha ha ha  No grenades, I swear!  It's just from Cassava Cakes and Hard Boiled Eggs (I heard there should be eggs in a cake...) with a Sparkler on top of it.  And because there are no plates in Ylands, it is served on rolled over Pizza Box. 

Edited December 9, 2016 by MichalMynář