The future of BallisticNG
Hey guys! I'm posting this to announce some big plans for BallisticNG. To keep things consistent across the board, this post is a slightly edited version of our Steam Announcement.
All the information you need to know is below, but in summary we are looking at extending BallisticNG further then we originally aimed. We will however need some financial backing if we are to do this. As of posting this thread and our Steam announcement we have started a Patreon campaign.
What this is about
As a small group of three working on a free title we don't have the funds to continue developing BallisticNG too much further in the long term. There are many goals that we would love to hit but simply can't because of time and financial constraints. We stand by BallisticNG being a free game and we will never change that; but by supporting us on Patreon you can help provide us with the income we need to take this from what has so far been a hobby into a full-time line of work.
If we can achieve that then we plan to take BallisticNG as it is now, reprogram the core and expand upon it to provide a much more fleshed out racing experience.
Making these changes will take a while. We fully understand any stigmas or concerns that are involved when doing such tasks, such as games dying or entering an infinite development state where they never reach completion. To combat this, we have set out clear goals for ourselves to measure against and we would like to provide people with the opportunity to get their hands on every change and improvement as soon as it happens.
If we are not able to get the financial backing for this then we will simply continue on with development as it is now, with a target final release date in Summer 2017 with the goals we mentioned in our 0.6 Steam release announcement. We would love to have the opportunity to extend the game further though.
We want people to gain something through their supporting us straight away, so if you donate to us through Patreon you will be given access to our development branch: a version of BallisticNG that is usually updated daily with all of the latest features, fixes, and immidiate corrections directly in response to player feedback. This branch represents the most current, cutting-edge state of the game as it exists on our own PCs. If you have previously donated to us through Itch.IO, check your inbox!
Our Plans
Below is a list of plans. This list can also be found on the Patreon page.
- Reprogram a large portion of the game to optimize it further and modularize everything. This will improve performance, speed up future development and allow us to implement new gamemodes, settings and content very easily.
- Vastly improve the modding tools. Our vision with the modding tools is to provide an intuitive and polished set of tools that casual users can pick up instantly and advanced users can dive into to make something amazing to share with people. We would also love to provide people with a scripting environment to program their own gamemodes and weapons with.
- Allow the game to read more industry standard file formats for modding such as FBX and DAE for models and TGA for textures.
- Extend upon multiplayer. Provide new features such as ingame chat, voice chat and rewrite the underlying structure to provide anti-cheat, stability and much, much better synchronization between players.
- Rewrite and standardize the user interface, improving user experience.
- Introduce a replay and replay editing system that allows you to share your best races with others and produce videos of your races with a set of tools to manipulate the camera and apply effects in realtime.
- Introduce an extended singleplayer campaign that provides content rewards including alternative ship skins and badges.
All these features are primarily an extension of the current game. While being funded will naturally give us the time to make supplementary improvements such as updating track scenery and ingame effects, the fundamental goal is to take the game we have now and make it even better. Ships will continue to handle exactly like they currently do and the game will continue to use the retro-3D artstyle.
BnG and you
Myself, Xpand and Dreadofmondays would like to also take this time to personally thank everyone here on WipeoutZone for supporting us through development so far. Working on BallisticNG is a lot of fun and it's been so good to be able to get positive and negative feedback that we can have discussions about. It's because of this forum that BallisticNG, and not to forget SlipstreamGX, were able to get a foothold and kick off to begin with. We are infinitely grateful to anyone who can find some spare change to throw our way once a month - developing games is what we want to do, and to be able to make a living off of our passion could only be called a dream come true.
P.S Hellfire and Infoxicated if you havn't already checked the BnG credits, you should :)
