It has certainly been a while since the last post here. Looking back over the past year, I haven’t had that much time, which is understandable given the events.
At first I was with Unity Technologies, working on rebooting their UI system which was meant to be a successor for NGUI, then after I parted ways with them I was too busy with NGUI — getting it into shape, doing support, all that… And yet, somehow toward the end there I managed to return to Windward — the first game that started it all — from my venture onto the Asset Store to the development of NGUI itself.
With fresh energy driving me forward I was able to restart the project pretty much from scratch, keeping only the music and the 3D models (the latter of which I had to partially re-do, but that’s not important). Now, not even 2.5 months later Windward has been released for Steam Early Access to get the player’s feedback on the new game.
Compared to the Windward from 2012 it’s a completely different beast. Gone are the skirmish maps, replaced with large, procedurally generated worlds. Gone are the healing cannonballs and all the abilities, replaced with new mechanics and talents. The progression was changed, adding questing and trading to the mix. The game itself was redone to use TNet instead of Unity networking, which not only stabilized the multiplayer but also added the ability to save the game for free (just how TNet works!).
All in all, it has been a hectic, furious two months of development — and I enjoyed every minute of it. And now, with roughly a month to go until the full release I’m now focusing on gathering player feedback and incorporating their desired changes into the game.