Firstly... Happy New Year!!! 2024 has been an absolutely epic year, and for me personally some of the lowest lows and highest highs I've ever experienced in my over 40 cycles around our Sun. It is very easy to get caught up in the negatives of the year, but I'd prefer to take this moment to reflect on the past 12 months, what has been accomplished in Halcyon Online, and what we're looking to achieve in 2025.
It's been a while, mate!
It has, and I'm sorry for that. The last few months have taken me away from this dream project of mine, and it's been absolute torture. But we're back, and progress has been solid this past month - so let's get to it.
What does 12 months of progress look like?
As it turns out, building a game of this magnitude is hard (lol, who knew!?). I'm beginning to understand why certain design decisions were made in other games of a similar nature, but for me - that's not good enough. The game mechanics and features shouldn't change just because something is difficult. Either the game has to have the features and game mechanics I want, or I give up. For that reason, the project has had an incredible number of challenges and setbacks, but every setback was eventually solved and the right solution put in place.
Part of the challenge is that I want Halcyon Online to be a real-time strategy game, not turn-based (the latter would be SO much easier to build!!!). The web was never designed for such games, so I've had to come up with various ways to manage that challenge. How the heck do you manage a real-time game if the web doesn't natively support that ideal? A novel approach and some clever ideas - that's how! Long and short of it is that by the end of 2024, we were able to get that system deployed and run our first test phase!
So, in summary, this is what was accomplished in 2024:
- JWTC joined the dev team in February. JWTC is new to development, but has an amazing passion and ability to learn fast. I worked with JWTC briefly on one of his own projects (https://legionbuilder.app/) and was impressed by his ability to pick up new technologies and get things done. He was also open to constructive feedback, making working with him easy. For those reasons, I made an offer to JWTC to join as a partner in the game's development. He has been pivotal in getting some features working such as Authentication, and is now working on the tech tree!
- Developed the hexmap technology for infrastructure management on both the client and server. This was a load of fun to create, as we now have procedural map generation for every celestial body, as well a suite of tools for future features like Terraforming!
- Initial UI/UX design was completed and implemented - and boy does it look SUHWEEEET!!!! 😀
- Game screen transitions and slick animations between screens. I spent literally weeks on this stuff to get it "just right". The end result is a beautiful interface experience that I hope you all love 😄
- Authentication mechanisms for email, email & password, google, facebook, x and discord were all added, meaning players could login with their favourite platform!
- Infrastructure management DONE!!!! I can't state enough just how important (and how epic) this step was. Getting the first major game feature completed demanded an entire year's worth of work, as I needed to develop all of the foundations necessary for the underlying game mechanics. Just so we could build our first structure! Pieces for this required the Timewarp engine (our custom engine for managing real-time game mechanics in an essentially stateless environment), our custom Hexmap technology for the geographical maps, UI/UX architecture for managing structures (building, upgrading and destroying), clever notification systems, client update systems, and a lot more! Needless to say, with this first major piece out of the way, the rest of the game's development will start to fly ahead!
- Our first test phase!!! WOOT!
First test phase
Back in September we launched the pre-alpha test round. Shoutout again to Helb who has been invaluable, providing great bug reports and doing a lot of playtesting! If you see him on the Discord, be sure to say hello and offer your thanks. Players like Helb are the kind we're looking for to playtest the game, and believe me when I say that such commitment will not go unrewarded!
The result of all those bug reports is a huge number of bug fixes, patches, re-engineering of some features, and a slew of other resolutions to get the server and client behaving the way it needs to. Still some work to go on this front, but the underlying foundations are now more solid than ever before, and we're getting really close to move onto the next set of game features!
Looking ahead
Alright, so with all that behind us, what does 2025 look like? Firstly, I think it's a good time to mention the updated Roadmap, with lots of changes and updates to timelines and expectations. Let's elaborate on those updates:
With the core game architecture and design completed, we can work on other game features, starting with research & technology. This is what opens up for players once they build their first Laboratory, allowing them to unlock various technologies to advance through the game. Every research piece will unlock something new, so as a player you will always have new and interesting things to do, from being able to build a space station, to unlocking colonisation ships or terraforming technology, or even by late game - how to harness the power of your system's parent star! 🫨
When research is done, we can begin to add more and more content to the game, namely research and infrastructure items, preparing for spacecraft production, which eventually leads to multi-planetary empires! Once this is done, we will be shooting squarely for a PvE-only Open Beta test phase, as we work on the combat engine against NPC factions, and do lots of testing, collecting feedback and preparing for PvP mode.
It's looking to be a monster year for Halcyon Online, and if all goes well we could be in the Open Beta stage by the end of 2025. Throughout the year we will be doing various test rounds and start inviting more and more playtesters to test out the game, collect feedback and continue to add more and more content.
2024 had its challenges, both for the game and in my personal life, and I can't wait to put it behind me. In hindsight however, I feel like the past year has been all about preparing me for this year, and getting Halcyon Online as close to retail launch as soon as possible!
So, that's that - a massive 2024 behind us and an even bigger 2025 lurking ahead.
What are you most excited for, Traveller?
Kirk