Alpha v2 Dev Cycle Plan (Patreon)

Judge Heath here, with a little bit about what the future holds for Cloud Meadow.

So here we want to describe our plans going forward for development of the game in the upcoming months and year. Alpha v2 is where things should really start kicking off, and like Alpha v1, it's broken up into 4 stages. These are currently in reorganization based on priorities and where we though we would be before now. Firstly, I'm prefacing this with the fact that we will be switching the tiers for 2nd programmer and 2nd animator, as we feel our pace in programming is far behind where we want it to be, far more so, at least, than Animation is.

The first stage of Alpha v2 development (Alpha v2.01) is going to be about getting the level up system, the dungeons, and the story modes all up and running. We want to get the interactions between characters running, the main plot on the move, and all that good stuff. It'll involve allowing character advancement, as well as capturing monsters, bootstrapping the economy, and other nice things like that.

Next up (Alpha v2.02) is the farming upgrade system. This'll finalize all the stuff in terms of how the farms function, the day/night cycle, the seasons, the building of structures and similar.  Once this is done, all the necessary mechanical features will be in the game as far as we're concerned, and the rest is about building on existing systems.

Alpha v2.03 should be the shortest segment, as it involves introducing the cooking system and the foundation of any future crafting systems we want to implement.

Alpha v2.04 is when things heat up, with random events outside of dungeons, seasonal, timed, events, and things such as that.  This will round out the last of the story stuff we want to implement.

We're also reevaluating our time line, and trying to decide if we should cut features entirely, greatly reducing the content of the game, or if we should put up a vote to our patrons for extending our timeline beyond the original 2 years (at most, 2.5 years) we stated we wished to do. It's not something we're taking lightly in asking about, and even the decision, one way or another, is going to be left up until we've hit our current halfway mark, thus upcoming August.

As always, we thank you for your support and patronage, and hope this gives you some idea of what we intend to be doing with the game when we hit Alpha v2.