Hello!

Work has now progressed to the point that we feel like we can share a plan for the next several months of development, all the way up to the release.  It has been a long road of course, and I'm sorry it has taken so much time to get to this point, but as it turns out there was an awful lot of stuff to do ha ha.  And there's still quite a bit left to go.

We need to maintain some flexibility to react to feedback or emerging circumstances, so the following can't be set in stone.  But hopefully it offers something of an idea about what's up.  I know there are various levels of patience out there.  All we can do is keep at it and try to plan the next steps carefully.

Here's the rough roadmap:

1. Finish the menus that haven't been upgraded yet.  These include the graphics and layout for justice, health, diplomacy, and hauling.  These aren't small tasks; each will take weeks.  I'll also be working with Jacob during this period on the sprites we need to update throughout the project.  He submitted the new weapons recently, for instance, and I also got a new batch of music from the composer.  It's important to get these things incorporated in a timely fashion so everybody can keep working.

2. As the menus are finished, and the graphics updates are completed, we'll move on to some important interface and usability improvements (tooltips everywhere, Xs to close windows, hotkey support, etc).  Some of these can be done fairly quickly, but a few are chunky additions, and there are lots of them to do.  After this part is done, the game should be much easier to get into.  At the same time, we'll also be continuing to add graphics (flows, the ocean and beach, some more shadows, etc.)

3. All this time, of course, we've been fixing old bugs and making new bugs and fixing them, and here we'll need to focus and spend some quality time with them, so that we have as smooth a launch as possible.

4. We're not sure what level of Steam Workshop will be needed for modding support, and it needs investigation.

5. The old ASCII version has other game modes - Adventure mode, Legends mode, and Arena mode.  We've made significant progress on Legends mode, but we haven't done anything with Adventure mode and Arena mode yet.  We also have the Classic ASCII mode to support, and we are also working on Mac and Linux builds.

6. There's the matter of Steam achievements and the other various Steam features.  We'd like to support whatever people are into here, eventually.

When we finish the first three points, we'll have the playable fort game on Windows.  The path ahead is now shorter than the path behind, and looking at the amount of graphics left to produce and the amount of menus to update, it looks like our earliest possible launch date would be in the fall.  Many of the things from #5 or #6 will delay the launch significantly, and this leads to some very hard questions indeed!  I know most of you want us to launch the game as soon as it is feasible, so we've been thinking about what it might look like to do some of #5 or #6 post-launch.

We'd been hoping to have more of these later items done faster, of course, but a few things happened.  Well, 2020 and 2021 happened, ha ha.  Also, my original plan for how Classic mode might be implemented has only partially panned out.  I made an ASCII friendly interface layer, which'll be a great help, but I underestimated how long it would take to retool all of the smaller clickable buttons into an ASCII-friendly state.  A few menus will need to be redone from scratch, and my current thinking is that doing ASCII versions of the menus alone would take a few months.  I'd mostly been accounting for keeping and adapting the ASCII glyphs we already had in place, with some alterations to support for example the ability to see multiple Z levels, but the menus have changed so much it's now a much larger project.  The hard question then is do we want to delay the initial release to do this?  Or launch, and then do the free update after.

Adventure mode is straightforward in its way.  I don't expect it'll have many real development gotchas, but it does have dozens of menus, some of them quite complex.  So similarly, that'll be months of work to complete.  It's an important part of the game and has figured into some of the most well-known DF community stories, but it's also separate enough from Fortress mode that we can conceive of letting people get their hands on fort mode first.  Again, delay or launch?

We'll be pondering this and considering feedback.  We'll eventually get to everything; it's just a matter of the best order to do things, with a different right answer for different players, frustratingly enough!  I'm grateful for how patient people have been in general, especially with everything going on, and thankful for the support we've gotten from the community and Kitfox as we try to get this initial release together.

We'll continue to keep you posted with regular news updates.

-Tarn