The (very) long-awaited Roadmap blog is finally here! Thanks for your patience while we found the time to put it together for you, and please thank Jeto specifically for reminding me/poking me/yelling at me/turning up in my front yard in the middle of the night to get it out to you.
The Roadmap has changed (again), and we’re gonna talk about why and how we’re changing the way we talk about the Roadmap moving forward.
Okay, so why do the Roadmaps change?
Well, mostly because the things we need (and want) to do right now are… Really big.
We know when we make the decision to tackle a big thing that it is, in fact, big. But these features are like deciding to climb a distant mountain; We can pretty accurately work out everything up to the base of the mountain, but it’s only as we get closer and closer to it that we can see in better detail all the possible ways we might die. Some things that might kill you, you can’t even see until you’ve started the climb.
Basically, because some of these things are big, systemic changes to the game, it’s not until we get our hands into it that we start to see the full complexity, and it’s not until we see the full complexity that we can start to problem-solve those things.
But, y’know what?
That all probably sounds familiar.
What are we doing with the Roadmap moving forward?
It became pretty clear to us recently that some of these big ol’ features can’t be held to a firm date. They need to take as long as they’re going to take to get right. We’ve said similar things before when we’ve had to move things further down the Roadmap, but we don’t like having to do that. We want you to be relatively confident that when we give you a target for a thing that that is when it will happen.
As more of these giant things we’re doing get finished and we feel that the game as a whole is in a pretty good place, it is our expectation that we can be a little more settled and predictable.
But until then…
What are we doing?
Introducing: R&D
Affectionately known internally as “Defrosting” – Not ready for cooking, but it will be!
We’re splitting the Roadmap for you into a couple of parts:
- R&D
- These are those big features we keep having to move. We still want you folks to know what it is we’re working on but we don’t wanna put a date on it. We’ll share some philosophy behind why we want to make changes with you and give you folks some insight into the process of how we approach these features.
- Even without a specific date on it, we’ll give you a bit of an idea of whether it’s more of a “soon”, “later” or “way later” situation.
- Coming Up
- These are things coming up where we can be more specific and confident about their release. So as you can imagine, things will be moving out of R&D and into coming up once we’re satisfied that they’ve been in the lab long enough.
(We’ll be focusing on R&D for this particular blog entry but we’ll see about getting you a Coming Up blog for Update 2.4 soon!)
- These are things coming up where we can be more specific and confident about their release. So as you can imagine, things will be moving out of R&D and into coming up once we’re satisfied that they’ve been in the lab long enough.
Are these things the only things we’re working on?
Nope!
Most of the R&D features are being tinkered with, investigated and wept over while we work on smaller, more straightforward little additions, quality of life improvements, bug fixes and our regular Seasonal content.
What’s coming up?
Author’s Note: This blog got really, really long so we can’t fit in everything we’re doing right now, but I hope this is a good start!
(They had to take the document off me. It got ugly.)
The phrase “Puzzle Questy” comes up a lot over here in the ol’ Infinity Plus Two office. A lot of what we’re working on boils down to “make it more Puzzle Questy.”
Remember, that several of these changes are pretty big. We will be giving you full details when we’re ready and there will be plans made for transitions as they need to occur.
Spell System Rework
Status: Soon!
What's the gist of it?
We want to encourage a variety of strategies and play-styles. It should be easy and fine to want to swap your spells around before a battle. Right now, the system doesn’t support much of that kind of flexibility because you almost need to choose a select few spells and stick with those. This is fine, but not necessarily the most fun and juicy it could be.
We’re also wanting to inject some of that “Puzzle Questy” goodness back into the system and have spells be more exciting things you find and learn.
And one final question I think we’ve all been looking for an answer to…
“Why do I have all these duplicate spells laying around?”
How are we doing it?
If we want more flexibility, upgrades for spells need to be smoother and simpler, and we need something for extra copies of spells to do other than sitting around in your inventory.
Related to that (and ‘Puzzle Questy’): We think spells should live in a spell book, don’t you? 
Where is this at right now?
This is one of the items closest to development.
Our designers are at a point where the design is complete, we just need to work out the finer details with our hardest-nosed developers.
We’re very excited about what we’ve seen so far. So watch this space!
We will update you folks with a full breakdown of the system once we’re ready!
A Brave New World (Map)
Status: Uhhhh… Soon-Later-Way-Later-ish
What's the gist of it?
One of the primary reasons we started to look at the World Map is that it’s a little… Cramped?
For context, Sirrian has explained that our Etheria map covers a continent-sized space the equivalent of Europe. So if you think of the distances we cover in each little segment of our Story and Adventures, that’s some very, very tired Hero feet.
We also miss some of the richness of our PQ1 and PQ2 World Map. Even just adding in the ability to scroll around the map in Adventures made us pretty hungry for more to explore.
It’s not all cosmetic though! We’re also feeling like we’d like to be able to use our map more centrally in terms of how the game is experienced.
You can fully expect this section to split out into multiple different ones in future updates because it will end up touching quite a few things.
How are we doing it and where is it at?
Well, like I said, there’s a few components to this that will all come together:
Making It Pretty!
We will be doing a cosmetic rework to the World Map. We’d like more space, more detail, more sheep.
We’re still a little ways off with this one because we need to make sure that the tech we need to use works, that we can get what we need out of it and that we aren’t going to explode anyone’s devices before we let the artists at it. Here’s a preview of a very, very early tech test from not long ago:
The engineer who’s taken this on has most recently been doing extensive tests to see what our limitations are on different devices. Turns out one possible method of creating terrain was definitely going to… Um… Explode some older devices… So we will not be doing that specific thing in the final.
Feels Like Home
We’d really like the World Map to be more central to the PQ experience than just where battles happen. There is something in that that has that “Puzzle Questy” feeling we’re after.
We’re currently looking at how we can have the World Map be a more interactable, meaty space you want to be in that smoothly incorporates more elements of the core game.
This will likely come after the cosmetic side because we can’t really go poking around at what we can do with the World Map until it has taken its final shape, but we’ve definitely got ideas that we hope can preview once they’re a little more solid.
Off The Rails!
You know what’s cool about Adventures? Being able to choose your own pathway and spread those wings a little more! We want to bring that over into the World Map more generally.
Wish we could be more specific, but honestly, there’s so many possibilities that you’ll see us branch off multiple pathways in this area.
What if you could go on little journeys with your Followers off the beaten path?
What if you could go looking for special things or find out more about places by exploring them?
WE’RE SO EXCITED ABOUT WHAT WE COULD DO.
Gear System Rework
Status: Later
What's the gist of it?
This came up at the same time we were looking at spells. Somethin’ just wasn’t feelin’ right.
We’d again like Gear to have a bit more flexibility to it and we’d like upgrades and finding new gear to feel a bit more exciting.
And, much like spells…
So… Many… Duplicates… In… Inventory…
How are we doing it?
This is a little more of an open question at the moment! We’ve been throwing around some ideas for how we might go about it.
A couple of principles guiding us are…
– Making sure any changes we make are fun and not a chore
– Not over-complicating things
– Not changing too much about the inner workings of items themselves
– We want to reduce friction
Where is this at right now?
This one is still in R&D, so it’s a little further off.
Way back at the beginning we had wanted to push it out at the same time as any changes we made to spells, but we figured out a little while back that that may not be practical.
While we’ve got a general idea of what we’re pretty sure the system will look like, we do also want to see what you folks think of the Spells System when we get that out because Gear should definitely be complementing the Spells!
My Little Minions
Status: Later
What's the gist of it?
Minions are so cute and we love them so much, but if we’re being honest, they’ve been a bit of a black sheep in the Puzzle Quest 3 family. They never quite fit in.
We want to do right by them and give them a more cohesive, natural place in PQ3.
How are we doing it?
We think this will be a multi-part process.
They should definitely have a little job to do that makes sense. (Not that lockpicking minions aren’t pretty cool.)
We’d also love to see them around the place more. Even if they’re just there to look pretty!
Where is this at right now?
We think this will come after and probably as part of the World Map changes above. We’re trying to keep systems cohesive, so we think there’s a natural place for them there.
We also have some animation and pipeline tests to run… 👀👀👀
But, Wait! There's More!
This blog is already very long, so we’ll need to leave it there for the minute. But some other things we’ve got bubbling on the back hotplate right now are…
– Mini Games (Soonish)
– Versus (Kind of always ongoing right now and is definitely the passion project of our Lead Engineer)
– Tower (Way Later but only because we need to do some of that other stuff first)
– And more…
We’re also thinking about Kingdoms, Party and Friends at the moment. We’re definitely working on getting a few little bits and pieces into the next few updates while we sort out some of the monsters we just talked about.
And, much like ice cream, we’re always making sure we leave room for little Quality of Life things throughout. The CX team is always keeping us (loudly) up-to-date about bugs being found and requests you folks have.
Oh! Also, here’s a little preview of a little project one of our devs has been working on in addition to our other update work that he’s hoping can be with you for the holidays!
Signing Off (For Now)
Well, we hope you understand a bit more about what we’re working on at the moment and some of our processes! If we can get the time to get the entries together, we’d love to invite you folks into more of the journey of how all of this stuff comes together over the long term.
Remember, just because something wasn’t covered in everything we just talked about doesn’t mean it isn’t on our minds. Just that there’s a limit to what any team can have on the go at any one time. We’re trying to address up front what we think some of the biggest areas of missing Puzzle Questy-ness are so we can keep building on a very solid foundation after that!
Thanks so much again for your patience with us in putting this blog together, folks! It’s been a marathon and we’re always grateful to you as a community for sticking around, giving us feedback and being awesome in our community spaces!