Good to see so many new future players join the project and follow its development. We've seen a large uptick in interest of the game and that's always reassuring to see. So with that in mind, I'd like to provide another update and welcome our new members - thank you so much for your support!
Lore
We've now posted two separate stories regarding the events leading up to the exodus of Earth and the events that led to Humanity's departure. You can read them here and here. If you're interested in the background of Halcyon Online and its beginnings, they're a great starting point - and we'll be posting more in the months ahead, including "Landfall" - a story about the arks arriving at their destinations many years after Exodus.
Leading by design
I feel that one of the key areas of the game that needs to really hit the mark - is the user interface. With that in mind, I'll be working with a designer I've been following now for 20 years - Michael Heald from https://fullyillustrated.com .
Michael is a user interface and game art veteran in the indie game space, and will be kicking off the interface design for the project in the coming weeks. Expect a fresh logo, beautiful interface design and above all - a solution that embraces some of the aspects of the game that I really want to capture: the desolation and loneliness of deep space, as well as the desperation that humanity finds itself in, a few thousand years after the events that destroyed Earth.
Business model
I've been speaking with various people on our discord server, and there's certainly a split in regards to how this should be approached. In short, there's a couple of variations that avoid the pay-to-win mantra that has become rife within the MMO RTS space:
- Pay-to-play with a generous trial period: allow players to play completely free up until a certain point (that point still to be worked out) or,
- Free-to-play but pay for quality-of-life features: The game is entirely free, but if you'd like a better user experience, notifications, or certain features like Alliance creation and management, you'd need to subscribe.
There are other potential avenues as well, but they become more and more difficult to monetise effectively without causing serious challenges, both for players, and for the project itself. If you'd like to weigh in on those discussions, feel free to join us on our discord.
Game development
Progress is slow as you might imagine. Unfortunately my previous partner chose to move on as they were unable to spend the time required to make good progress. More power to them of course, I fully respect such decisions. I can only expect anyone to be able to contribute what they might be comfortable with.
That aside, I've decided to move away from Firebase as the core platform to support the game for a number of reasons, but the main one was complexity. It was actually overly-complex to support certain features, so I began moving forward with a more traditional technology stack.
Lots of work has been done since that move, with the essential authentication features done, galaxy forming and generation completed, and have begun work on empire creation and planet colonisation. I also made some good headway on some changes in game design choices, which move Halcyon Online further away from the current incumbents and all the various "OGame clones" which makes Halcyon Online a more unique offering.
I've also started studying various game art creation processes, and these will help me to create the various planets, asteroids, moons and other celestial bodies you'll see throughout the game.
Despite the development setback, Halcyon Online is moving forward at a comfortable pace, and I'll have another Infoslate for you in a couple more months. As I approach the end of the year and head toward Alpha testing phase, these updates will also come more regularly, so stay tuned!
Kirk