New year update

Update for the new year

Two years have passed since I began full-time work on Macrocosm. From the start, Macrocosm has been a bootstrap project with myself as the sole developer. Throughout this time I have kept development costs to a bare minimum and the only real substantial costs has been my opportunity cost vis-a-vis holding down a job. 

With the coming year some changes are afoot. Lately I have had some changes in life events and with that came some software engineering opportunities outside of game development that requires a large portion of my time.

I still expect to continue development on the game but updates and changes may come at infrequent intervals and I may scope down the scale of development just to get features out the door and concentrate on engine improvements. I have always envisioned Macrocosm as a long, life journey with multiple milestones along the way, as each road post is passed, the vision of the game becomes more concrete and viable.

At some point in the future, all else being constant, I will return to full-time development but for now, I expect the pace of updates to slow down significantly - especially in the immediate next few months.

With that out of the way, I would like to a cover a few planned changes to the game that I have in mind for this year:

• Adding a minimap/big picture view of the world, my original idea is along the lines of the minimap found in RTS games.
• Add more interactive NPCs, including bandits and faction NPCs.
• Improve reliability and robustness of the engine.
• Balance core gameplay loop based around commodity trading and survival.

In short, I will continue to chip a way, but sometimes, you gotta go a little slower, so that down the line, you can pick up speed again

- K