The game plan

While the finished game is still far off into the future, I’d still like to be able to release something for you blog readers to download and play around with – and provide feedback on. I’ve received invaluable feedback and bug reports from players of my freeware game, Ascii Sector, and while Hostile Takeover won’t be freeware (and I’d thus be shooting myself in the foot by releasing the entire in-development game for free), I’d still love to be able to release something once in awhile.

My plan is to make the in-development versions of the game’s demo available for download when the game engine is running fairly stable and there’s actually something to do in the demo (mostly shooting people, I imagine!). I’m still working on the most basic stuff (currently making hundreds of sprite pieces in order to have characters not all look alike) but after that I’ll probably start working on adding some features that aren’t just about the game engine, but also about gameplay.

The full demo of the game will contain a few of the game’s starting missions and that’s what I’m currently working towards. So while the demo will function primarily as a gameplay demo for potential buyers, for me it’ll also function as a milestone in that I want the engine to be pretty much feature complete for the demo. It’ll then “just” be a matter of adding missions and assets for the full game.

It’s still a bit too early to say how far off the first alpha release of the demo is, but I hope to be able to release something at least within the next six months, hopefully sooner rather than later.