Planning & Estimation Review 4
It's time for another round of estimations review.
This time decided to change one big thing: Instead of presenting the game engine as a release, I will present the Sandbox (Demo) version of the game. This is because if I take your precious time, I'd like to make the most of it and show how the game will look like instead of how the tech behind the curtains works. The issue was that from my engineering side, 75% of all work is going to the game engine rather than the game itself, that's why I felt like releasing the game engine/editor first. However from a marketing perspective, it doesn't make any sense for me to show deep technical features for gamers prior to presenting the game itself. That doesn't mean I'm not going to publish the game engine, I surely will, that is the main mod tool for the game itself, I'll make sure to make it available for modders.
The estimations are becoming more solid each review, now here are the new estimation dates:
| Sandbox Pre-Alpha | October, 2024 |
| Closed Sandbox Alpha | June, 2025 |
| Open Sandbox Alpha (Unconfirmed) | August, 2025 |
| Closed Sandbox Beta | September, 2026 |
| Open Sandbox Beta (Unconfirmed) | January, 2027 |
| Closed Pre-Alpha | June, 2028 |
| Open Pre-Alpha | September, 2028 |
| Closed Alpha: | April, 2029 |
| Open Alpha: | September, 2029 |
| Closed Beta: | March, 2030 |
| Open Beta: | September, 2030 |
| Closed Release Candidate: | November, 2030 |
| Official Public Release: | December, 2030 |
As always, it's important to remember that, these are quite artificial estimations, they were generated by spreadsheet calculations based on how much of my free time I can dedicate to this project. Later down the line, I plan to open it for collective funding and if all goes well, I may be able to dedicate more time to it, as I always wanted and expedite.
As a progress update, I've been working on a Class System Editor, even though very important it's unfortunately nothing visual, so no fun screen capture this time :(
After this Estimation review, the game is 22.1% complete and 82.1% ready for Sandbox Pre-alpha release.