Overgrowth's new game plan

Around seven months ago we increased the team size, and started releasing alphas every other week. During this time we've made good progress, but the game hasn't been coming together as quickly as we hoped. So, we're trying a new plan.

The problems

The issues that we want to solve are the following:

1. Since we are adding new features while fixing bugs at the same time, bugs are added to the game at the same rate as we are fixing them, resulting in an unstable game.
2. The updates and changelogs are not always as interesting as they should be. Game development takes time, and even with this larger team, two weeks is not enough time to reliably make an exciting release.
3. The user experience for new players is pretty poor right now, not only due to bugs, but because it's difficult for them to learn about and get to all the features that are currently in the game.

The solutions

To address these issues, we are going to stop releasing an alpha every other week. Instead we'll work towards specific milestones with internal deadlines, and once a milestone is reached we release an alpha after a bug testing phase. This will help make alphas more stable and interesting.

The first milestone on our list is to fix the user experience. This includes fixing many bugs, making a tutorial and adding menu items for all the modes that currently exist in the game. We are aiming to release this alpha during next month.

Arena mode changes

We realized the scope of the arena mode was too ambitious, so we've decided to reduce it. It was like a combination of a story campaign and an arena mode, with even more features on top of that. We've decided to make it into a series of arena challenges instead and remove the meta game. This will let us finish it in a more reasonable time frame while letting the story campaign take care of the storytelling.

The plan is to let each arena challenge take you though several fights to test your skills in a specific area such as sword fighting, free for all fights or slaying wolves. Beating one challenge will unlock access to the next one which will be harder than the previous. The arena challenge mode will be the next milestone after we're done with fixing the user experience.

Looking forward

Despite the lack of an alpha today we hope that you are as excited as we are to see this new plan come to fruition. Thank you for sticking with us, and we hope that you'll continue to support us as we find the best path to finally complete this project!