Jan 7, 2023
Arcadia: The Crystal Wars - thoranargaming
To everyone wondering is Arcadia still in development or has it fallen into the typical Indie void. The answer is yes it is still being developed.
I started this project years ago with a very ambitious plan. I was playing a lot of Kenshi, WoW, Divinty, and I thought to myself, you know what I want to take the best parts of each of those and combine them into a new title. I want the squad based combat and base building of Kenshi, with the stylized art style of WoW/Overwatch, and the story line and lore of Divinity. Obviously a lot for just a one person development team.
Despite the challenge, I was making a lot of progress and was able to get the game into a demo state for one of the Steam events. I'd say I got the game 90% of the way there from a technical buildout, the rest was populating it with content. This is where things got even more complicated. After a lot of failed attempts to get outside designers and artists to help support, I started to second guess myself and the "fun" factor of the game. I then started to cut corners as the release date become more important than stability of the game and it's core features.
So I halted it, put up a TBD on the release date, and took a step back from the development. You can say that I'm now going back to basics to focus on the core aspects and to reduce the overall scope of the game into a more manageable package for a solo developer.
So with that, what I can definitively say is two things. Number one, yes I'm still working on it and I'm going to work towards providing more regular updates on progress. Number two, the game will most likely look and feel different than it did during the steam festival demo and in the screenshots you see. My hope is obviously that it will be better, but it will certainly be different.
To give an idea of the changes, the biggest thing is the controls and camera. In my current development build, I've switched to first person controls with a third person camera (much like WoW and others), instead of a top down mouse click style. This allows me to create a much more interesting environment and allows the player to connect more to their character and their party. You will still have a party and base building, as those are core mechanics, but the top down Kenshi style control movement was not really working out.
Thank you all who have had this wishlisted since the beginning and have watched and waited. I'm still here, Arcadia is still here, and it will be released!
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