We start out planning the story and general game characteristics. Building a good story and characters is the emphasis; many developers will say this isn't the way to go. They may be right, but we want the world to have depth as well as good game dynamics. It certainly takes both, but for Arcane Particle the story and world is the backbone to build around.
As development of the story and characters and overall theme of the game progresses, we need artwork to help plan, prototype and create. Characters and world environment themes are the focus.
To help bring the game to life, we need to have an idea of how the players and environment would look in game. As part of this, we need to also narrow down the game engine we will use, which has been Unity to this point. 3d Design and Animation take an extremely long amount of time on par with the code. While we would love to make a AAA game, we know it isn't realistic, but we're going to get as close as we can for a "B Game" Indie development shop.
So to be completely honest, a large amount of time was spent going in what felt like circles, with small steps forward every now and then. This phase was a matter of figuring out what does and doesn't work. In hindsight, this could have been massively compressed. It is here we realize that game development shop or team that indicates a short 'simple' timeline is probably fooling us, themselves or both...
After leveling up our team and slowly building the basic outline of the world, we need to really nail down the game dynamics. Two key game areas we have been developing to and will need to flush out are 3d Platforming and Card Gaming. We plan to incorporate decentralized cryptocurrency constructs which should play well with a card battle dynamic.
Finally we reach the phase where we have platforming mechanics solidified. Wall running, rope climbing and swinging and more. Why aren't these things open sourced? Can you imagine how great of games we could have if more developers open sourced their work? Especially after the main profit has been obtained.
As game dynamics, characters and 3d work continue to be flushed out and developed we are now linking character classes and abilities to the player and world. This is required to build out the card game mechanics and possibly in the future other game play styles.
Between a small team and less than well defined milestone targets, here we are another year in with only prototype platforming and artwork to show. Revising our strategy a bit to double down on small playable releases should have been our key from the start.
Continued progress on all the other functionality of the game, however finally the card game dynamics have been fully prototyped. This will allow for the alpha release to come soon!
A playable alpha release is scheduled for February. We have not decided on a release platform as of yet (Steam or Itch, etc). This will be the moment of truth, do we have potential in the eye's of the community or will we need to go back to the grinding and leveling phase!? Please, keep expectations extremely low just in case ;p
The NFT and crypto-craze may be over by this point, but that would be a good thing for us. While it would be nice for us to create a token early and allow the community to invest and make a looot of money. We 1. Do not have the network to make a successful token launch and 2. Do not want to be like the large number of projects out there that have a token with nothing to show for it. We will not release any coin, token / NFT until our game has been made available as an alpha release.
The whitepaper will detail the reasoning and basis for the coin/token and how interactions will be managed via smart contracts and blockchain connections. While we have been planning blockchain components since 2019, our aim was to initially use the Cardano network which came out with smart contracts early-mid 2021. After reviewing the smart contract capabilities, it was found that ideally our game would integrate with Cardano's "Hydra" which is not slated until mid to end of 2022. We don't want to wait however, so there is a chance we will create our own side chain to manage game interactions for our world. We won't say the "M" word, because it's too soon to say and will be based someone on how our alpha release goes. There is also a possibility of using another blockchain all together (if so sorry Cardano!), eyeing Mina Protocol very heavily.
At this phase we should have our ducks in a row for token creation. If we end up creating our own side chain, we will still be releasing a token on the main chain first. Sidechain development would be a fork of an existing chain, with tweaks to focus on and target our specific use cases.
If everything goes well with the Alpha release, this release date should be able to be much closer. However, we're going to go assume Murphy's law and plan accordingly. By the time we have a beta release we should have ideally garnered at least a decent amount of attention without being scammy and the the time between token release and beta should allow for the hype to grow.
We cannot underestimate how long this could take, however with varying projects already available we're hoping we'll be able to make use of forked code to help this along. We have created simple solidity and plutus smart contracts (as of June 2021), so ideally by this time we will have drafted up the necessary connections to interact with our game. This will be an ongoing process that will not keep the game from releasing.
Assuming Beta had issues to resolve, we should have our game out and finalized by this time. Ultimately games nowadays are in non-stop development, so it all depends if we were able to make enough money to sustain the team and keep going or not. Ultimately we don't want the game to be cost prohibitive for anyone, play to earn and not rife with pay-only features. So that may or may not be to our own detriment, but hopefully it will be an awesome experience for everyone nonetheless. Worst case, we release the code and let the community have it to make better!
Admittedly this is a very arbitrary date, and could change widely. This milestone is actually not dependent on the funding we received and the work we were able to complete up until the product release. There are other projects external to Arcane Particle that require sidechain / smart contract components that may or may not be able to integrate with the same platform. Ideally whatever we come up with will be maintained and the reasoning / use will be revealed at a later date, let's just say it is big!
If we manage to make it passed 2023, there is no telling how Arcane Particle will or will not be the focus of how we move forward. However, always keep a pulse on failfection social media, as that is the parent company that will be holding the torch. Thank you all for the interest!
