Ylands development roadmap

[Ane 1213]

 

Ylands is not finished yet. In fact, the fun just started! Being in Early Alpha means that the game is changing and evolving all the time. This roadmap's aim is to show what some of our future plans for the game are. But bear in mind that throughout the development process ideas come and go and features are reworked, and therefore there are no specific dates for what is mentioned here.

Game Updates

Ylands should receive a new update at least once per month. There is no defined time, but it will mostly happen on Mondays/Tuesdays. If you have Ylands installed, the launcher will be updated automatically and you won't need to do anything to get these updates. Each of them will include new assets (items) for sure, and perhaps new features (either major or minor), but this is something we cannot guarantee will happen every update.

 

 

What to expect – Winter 2015/2016

Major features

Electricity

How to make your yland a brighter place? By electricity, of course!

When playing the Survive Scenario in particular, nights are crucial – currently the only way of getting light is by using fire or the Ylandium lamp. So how about having an electric lamp? The first electricity powered machines and devices will be introduced, and we will be adding new ones on a regular basis. There will be numerous ways of obtaining electricity, such as reaping the rare mineral Ylandium or harvesting natural sources.

You might also want to power a whole area – by designing and building the electrical grid you can decide which spots in particular are reached by electricity. 

Scenario Editor

Right now you can create your own ylands, but we want you to be able to even create your own scenarios!

You'll have complete control over these, as you can tweak and bend the world rules as you please. Once you've created the scenario you want, you can share it with your friends and create and assign roles for you to perform – imagine creating a Hunger Games type of scenario where your friends need to defeat each other in order to escape from the yland while you watch everything from above and decide when to help them.

This way, via visual scripting, you'll be able to create your own actions, events or even stories.

Minor features

Besides the listed major features, we'll continuously implement new assets, bug fixes and optimizations. These are some of the minor features that we have in store:

• New skills and activities
• Visual enhancements
• Improvements to the building mode
• Continuous iterations to: Survive Scenario's balance; combat; controls; User Interface 

 

We're not quite ready to reveal too many precise details about these features as we are at a stage where features are being continuously reworked.

 

What to expect – The Big Picture

We see Ylands as a game, but we also see it as a platform to create, explore and share. We plan to dedicate our efforts not only to built-in Create and Survive scenarios, but also to the platform itself. We want players to be able to create a custom game within Ylands, where they can modify anything about the world, giving them more and more control over every aspect of the game until they are not bound anymore by any specific built-in game type. In the future we plan to focus on many different areas in order to increase the scale and versatility of the game. Here is the list of a few key features we want to add to the experience in the coming months and years:

• Vehicles
• Animal companions
• Machines (including programmable robots)
• Modding support (and an official community platform to share user creations)
• The ability to create all kinds of different game types
• Improved multiplayer support

 

 Although things can change, we've tried to reveal the parts we are most sure about and, of course, there's more in the works! If you're specially interested in the development team working on something in particular, you can always comment on it in the feedback section. 

Edited November 12, 2015 by AneT