No news is usually good news, but not when it comes to a project you're all waiting to get your hands on!
Not much of an update for you all, as nothing of note has been done from a development perspective in January. However, as I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm currently working on wrapping up other side projects.
The good news is that this is getting close to being finished - there's a few last big pieces to go, with my estimation being that if I get enough time, I should have it wrapped up by mid-late February, meaning Halcyon Online fulltime development is just around the corner! This is much later than I had hoped, as the project has turned out to be quite a monster in regards to development time.
Outside of that, we published a new lore piece a few days ago, detailing the first of the Arks arriving at their destinations. Part 2 should arrive late-February, and this will begin to kick off the lore around the establishment of colonies on those planets, as well as the various factions that take off on their fated cosmic homes (yes, you heard that right!)
Make no mistake, Halcyon Online will have at least 3 factions, with 1 slated for launch, and the other 2 sometime in the next couple of years. We will begin laying the bedrock for those factions in the stories over the next 12 months, through their culture, technological development and individual challenges, as Humanity establishes its home amongst the stars.
On the development front, although no work has been done regarding the actual building of the game for a while now, there is still a lot of time being spent planning and documenting the various challenges.
Halcyon Online is not like other games - it leverages modern day tools, technologies and approaches to make it as engaging and as performant as possible, with a slick user interface and gorgeous artwork. My focus the past few weeks at least, has been in figuring out how to handle some of the more demanding computational tasks and ensuring that these are able to run as close to instant as possible.
I decided a while ago that PHP (my preferred language for development) just wasn't up to the task, so I've spent the last few months learning Elixir, a relatively new language that has amazing parallel processing capabilities. This is the main reason for why development has slowed. Learning a new programming language, its idioms and challenges, takes quite a bit of time.
If my other project concludes in February, this means I'll have a lot more time to spend on the game and the very first task I have to complete, is setting up the authentication server, which will serve two purposes:
- Manage all player accounts and their various achievements, globally, as well as
- Provide registration and authentication for all connected devices.
This alone is a huge job, but it's important to get this setup first, and separately - from the main game code, as I want players to be able to play from anywhere, on any device they choose, on any galaxy they wish, and by doing this - I can even have galaxies running in different countries, if the game is successful. So ensuring that this step is setup correctly from the get-go, means the game can theoretically grow to support the player base I hope to attract.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns about the game, ideas you'd like to share or desires for the game's development, be sure to connect with me over on our Discord.
Love you all - see you again next month 😁