The Goals of 2022

It's goal making time!

Infinite Level game discussed: The Future Project

Well folks, we did it. We got through another year. While it's fun to take a step back and look at the past year's events, I'm more the type to look ahead and see what I want to do in the future. However, I'm not really a New Years Resolutions sort of guy. I prefer to make my decisions throughout the year, and in 2021's case I've been thinking particularly hard throughout the year about what I hope to achieve with The Future Project and how I'm going to do it. Just a few days ago, I setup the Steam page for The Future Project (please visit and wishlist!), and in doing so I announced that I intend to release the game sometime in the year 2022. So of course, that's my main goal of the new year. As much as I'd love to give a more exact release date, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done on the game, and things can quickly and easily change as the year goes on. Naturally, rather than commit to any hard dates, I'll allow myself a little wiggle room and give a more accurate date when the time is right.

But that begs the question...what else remains to be done in this game? Sure, the main goal is to release The Future Project. But what are the steps that need to be taken to get there? I thought it would be fun to lay those steps out here in this blog, both as an informative “here's where we're at” style piece for you and as a rough planner for me (I'm kidding, I've known for a while what needs doing). Let's start with the very first feature listed in the game's description on Steam. The Future Project contains six different worlds to explore, each with their own distinct themes, enemies, and obstacles. The trailer released for the game alongside its Steam page gives you a glimpse at four of those worlds, with two of them being covered in detail in this very blog. Of the four shown off, none of them are one hundred percent finished. That probably sounds crazy, so allow me to elaborate a bit. When I say one hundred percent finished, I refer to having all the visual elements in, all necessary sound effects, every enemy programmed, maps completed, and any boss fights implemented, to name a few things. Take Distant Sibling for instance, the first major world of the game. It has most of its content in place, but it's still missing a major boss fight, placement of optional items, and some additional parts of the map to create. The boss fight is the biggest missing piece in this puzzle, with the other items being secondary in comparison. But, for the most part, Distant Sibling is a playable world. If you were to play it now, you likely wouldn't even notice that things are missing. So when I say none of the worlds are truly finished, don't be alarmed by that statement. Most of the worlds seen in the trailer need a boss fight or a couple enemies finished up, some items placed, and then they can be considered done. Only one of the four worlds still has a lot of work to do, that being the world shown off at the beginning of the trailer. Even then, it's mostly visual work.

When thinking about the work to come for the game's worlds, it's easy to see that the first several months of 2022 will be gobbled up by finishing up the main levels of the game, especially the two that weren't shown in the trailer at all. But honestly, once the maps are finally done, that's most of the work completed. Almost all of the game's mechanics are in place and have been in place for some time, with them only being polished since then. It was pretty important to me to make sure movement, firing guns, and using abilities was fun to do, so I spent a lot of the game's early development getting that right. And as I've said before, I still occasionally tweak it to make it that much better. Beyond making the player character feel good to control, there's a handful of visual things that need to be done too. I showed off the ice and fire abilities in the trailer, but I did not show earth or electricity, and there's a reason for that. The earth ability is largely done, visuals and all, but there's a couple changes I want to do that will make it look more polished that I couldn't complete in time for the trailer. Electricity, meanwhile, is still using many of the placeholder assets it's had since the beginning, and I really need to go in and change that. However, the player's left arm used for elemental abilities does have all the animations it needs to perform electric based attacks.

There's also still the issue of testing. While I've had a couple playtests done on the game, it was only in Distant Sibling and it was a long time ago at that. I want to start getting regular playtests going once the game has a definitive beginning, middle, and end. The hope is to have most of that in place around the same time as the remaining worlds get properly implemented. In fact, finalizing those remaining worlds will get that beginning portion of the game pretty much complete for me (one of the worlds houses the tutorial and early story), with the only major thing after that being the game's ending and final boss. At least by then I can start having playtests done on the game's main worlds, which will start to uncover any bugs I've missed along the way. I like to think I've done my due diligence and kept bugs to a minimum, but you can always count on playtesters to find issues you didn't even know you had. My wife especially likes to try and break my games as much as possible when playtesting, and she's alarmingly good at it.

So, broadly speaking, we have three major goals to finish before the game can be called done. There's finishing worlds, polishing up, and then finally playtesting. Listed out like this makes it seem like there's not much left to do, and I suppose that's technically correct. But when you break those major goals down into smaller pieces, it becomes pretty apparent that there's plenty left to be done. That's where this dev blog is going to come in handy. Now that I've done a big dump of screenshots and a new trailer, I feel a lot more comfortable going in depth with certain mechanics and worlds. So the next several dev blogs can go into detail about the worlds, gameplay mechanics, and story not yet shown off in the dev blog series. I also intend on having dev blog posts that are purely dedicated to being progress reports going into the new year, hopefully every three or four months. The timing on those kinds of posts may not be the most consistent, as they will be heavily dependent on how far the game has progressed since the last update. But, whenever one drops, it should give you a good idea of where things are at. If appropriate, these could also come with a new trailer or screenshots that specifically focus on things not yet shown, but that's going to be dependent on the content of the blog. Big new trailers or screenshot dumps could happen alongside dev blogs, but it's not a promise.

For the immediate future, I'm going to be focusing primarily on getting the remaining worlds finished. A lot of what's left is to make the visuals so that the worlds are actually done. As mentioned before, the fourth world has a lot of visual work remaining, as does the unshown remaining two worlds. One of those unseen worlds still has a lot of map making work on top of the visual items that need addressing, so it'll likely be the one I spend the most time on between now and the next major update. There's a handful of enemies that need programming too, though fortunately I've only got a few of those left to wrap up. Once all that's out of the way, then it'll be time to focus primarily on polish and endgame content before we finally hit the playtesting phase. Should be a lot of fun, a lot of effort, and certainly a lot of time, so I should probably go ahead and get back to it. I hope you had a great New Year's Eve and day, and a happy 2022. Let's make it a good one!

Until next time!

-Lance T.