Greetings fellow gods,
I've spent some time planning the extended scope for the Early Access to share with you in the form of a Roadmap, expanding on what I've described in the EA Announcement and adding your suggestions into the mix.
The 1.0 release of Soulash 2 is planned for around March 2025, which gives me about 3,000 hours to work with. I expanded the scope by a few months beyond the planned 1 year, so we have some wiggle room in case the game needs more bug-hunting and polishing time.
This Roadmap is a plan, and plans change constantly. My goal with it is to provide you with information that hopefully answers the flood of the same questions that keep popping up about the current development direction. This living document represents the current plans for the future, it will keep changing, and it is not a promise that any features mentioned here will be included in the final version of the game.
Further development beyond the planned scope depends on the sales and what I'll be more passionate about when the decision time comes. I already have exciting ideas for expanding Soulash 2 and a new project, so I will only decide where to go about 2 months after the full release when I see my budget, and I know what players want, just like with the first game.
Here's the plan.
- Core Features
v0.7 Adventuring Parties - done- v0.8 Settlement Management
- v0.9 Wars & Conquest
- v0.10 Events
- v1.0 Story and Victory Conditions
- Core Content
Pole Fighting - done- Hunting (Archery)
- Necromancy
- Unannounced Skills and Civilizations
- Mid Priority
- Family System
- Variety in Points of Interest
- Ocean Travel
- Playable Vampires / Liches
- More Skills
- Mounts & Multi-Tile Entities
- Bestiary
- Crime System Improvements
- Low Priority
- Carts
- Marketplace
- Delivery Service
- Game Translations
- Alternative Artstyle
- Final Thoughts
1. Core Features
The core defining features of the game that are yet to come. Details may change, but the overall scope completes the game.
v0.7 Adventuring Parties - Done
We invite beings to join us on our adventures, use their services, equip them with better gear, use them as mules to carry our resources and order them to do stuff for us.
v0.8 Settlement Management - Approx. June 2024
We can invite or capture beings to work in our towns. This part of the game is not meant to add too much micromanagement and is meant to offer a way to lead our settlement and conquered settlements in the next stage on a more macro level to produce wealth and collect people from around the world to serve our needs.
v0.9 Wars & Conquest - Approx. September 2024
NPC Settlements wage wars against each other, battle in the world, perform raids, claim settlements, and establish local military companies to control the local population for wealth production. As players, we will be able to conquer or free captured settlements. This is also when a potential for profiting out of weapons and armor as a crafter-trader will open up, as raging wars can simulate the demand.
v0.10 Events - Approx. December 2024
Special location units may raid settlements or attack caravans. Unemployed beings in settlements form roaming groups that can offer various interactions during world travels.
v1.0 Story and Victory Conditions - Approx. March 2025
Soulash 2 happens after the ash ending of Soulash 1, and the final 1.0 update will bring the continuation of the story from the first game. The story will be an optional part of the history simulation in the Dark Fantasy mode. It will offer a way to win the game as an alternative to the complete freedom of the sandbox experience.
This remains the same as announced before, except I've increased the timeframe by 3 months to split the Events and Story updates into two parts as I think both can benefit from it.
2. Core Content
These will come as part of the weekly and major updates throughout the planned scope.
- Pole Fighting skill
- Hunting (Archery) skill
- Necromancy skill - not sooner than Wars & Conquest update
- X unannounced skills - no further physical combat skills are planned. The focus will be on new magic and utility skills.
- X unannounced additional playable races with civilizations - prioritizing unclaimed biomes.
I've estimated the core scope of features and content will take about 2,000 hours, which is 2/3rd of the budget.
3. Mid Priority
Bigger features will only come if there's enough time outside the core scope to allocate towards them. They may come as part of the weekly or major updates or even through iterations of multiple updates. These come mainly from popular major suggestions from #s2-suggestions Discord channel.
Family System - discussion here
A definite winner in terms of the number of requests. And I agree wholeheartedly that a deeper family system with continuation through chosen family members perfectly fits the game. This is top priority outside the core scope.
Variety in Points of Interest - discussion here
I don't know if I want to go with the idea of elites because I think it's a bit overused in games and turns the reward system into just hunting for big boys, but I think adding overall unpredictability into the PoIs in some way will be an ongoing thing over the next year.
It could be an integration with the event system or maybe some global buffs and debuffs. Either way, it would be beneficial to have additional systems that will interact with the existing ones to make the locations less repetitive in terms of challenge, and even though it requires significant time investment, the value added in replayability would make up for it. I'm also considering the potential for optional increases in difficulty around PoIs.
Ocean Travel
Some form of this has to come to the game, but I have yet to decide the approach.
The coolest way would be to create ship travel and unlock ocean biomes for events and even special locations. The issue with that is obvious - it would require a lot of new mechanics and content that would have to come at the expense of other major ideas. The scope could be as big as a major DLC.
Another option is to look for simplifications, like talking to a specific NPC in a town near Ocean to travel to any shore for a price and food supply. This could be done within a weekly update scope and solve the travel problem, but it is way less exciting.
Either way, it's listed here because it has to come in some form, but I'm delaying it to think about the direction to take.
Playable Vampires / Liches - discussion here
Vampires and Liches is something I think about often. Maybe they should just be available through the character creator from the start, or there should be some requirement to become them during a playthrough.
It is problematic during playthroughs because of portrait changes, how vampirism would affect different races, or whether it should only be locked to humans.
On the other hand, it would be a cool path to immortality. Both could also be some alternative paths of the Necromancy skill. Either way, I'm a big fan of both Liches and Vampires and want to see them in the game, but I'm still waiting for any of these ideas to excite me enough to commit to them.
More Skills - discussion here
A lot can be done regarding skills. There are plenty of ideas - various magic skills, crafting skills, new ways to interact with the world, having something that expands on the leadership capabilities, and so on. Each skill takes about a whole week of work once it's fully designed, assuming it's built around completely new mechanics, but they are great for replay value. Skills are also very easy to add through modding, so I don't want to go for quantity here because modding can offer a lot of variety too.
Ultimately, a specific skill will happen if I have an exciting idea for new mechanics. Otherwise, I leave it for other passionate people to add their favorite flavor with Modding Tools.
Mounts & Multi-Tile Entities
This is something I mentioned before and still want very much, but it was always nice to have feature outside the core scope. After seeing what you, the players, want to see in the game, I've decided to deprioritize this over things like the Family System.
I'm hopeful these will find their way into the game despite presenting a rather complex technical challenge with pathfinding, as it would add a lot of interesting new challenges in combat that weren't explored in other games. We'll have to see how things progress.
Bestiary - discussion here
I like this one quite a lot, although I need to figure out the form in which to have that in the game. Some of these ideas may become a part of the Hunting skill in a more simplified form or a fully new system for collecting information about world inhabitants. Not sure yet.
Crime System Improvements - discussion here
Some more iterations to the crime system are needed, but I'm still determining where to take it with the pending Adventuring Parties and Settlement Management updates.
4. Low Priority
Popular requests that are less likely to come in the proposed form.
Carts - discussion here
Carts would be great for sure, but very costly to add, and what they solve may be solved by the Adventuring Parties update too. I don't believe it's good enough compared to other things that can be done in that time, but we'll see how things change with time.
Marketplace - discussion here
It would speed up trading, but if that's the main purpose, trading directly on the world map with a simpler GUI element would be easier to add and more efficient. But it doesn't improve trading enough to justify the time investment right now, and there are better ideas to pursue. Maybe if I ever have enough good ideas for a dedicated Trading skill, it could find its way, but right now, I don't see it over other options.
Delivery Service - discussion here
It's not a big feature, and I can see how it could save a few minutes of travel time and a couple of in-game days to unload the haul from PoIs, but I'm not feeling it. Maybe I'll change my mind as time goes on and consider it a better fit as an extension to our Adventuring Parties, as a way to send someone from our group to unload the loot. We'll see.
Game Translations
Translations to languages other than English are commonly requested. There are no plans to add official translations before we get closer to 1.0, and even then, it might be a matter of budget. Modding is also problematic because my engine only supports ASCII characters in rendered text. I did some preliminary checks recently, and it requires a rewrite, so it's substantial work. I deprioritized it for now to focus on making a fantastic game first.
Alternative Artstyle
It's been a common request to change the circular portraits to something else, and unfortunately, after reading about player expectations from different sources, I see no option for this. At this point, we'll continue improving the presentation with the current direction. It's here in the roadmap at the lowest possible priority because if something unexpectedly positive happens where we could expand the development team, we could pick it up from under the table to include players for whom this is a dealbreaker.
5. Final Thoughts
Some other major requests that were quite popular but weren't mentioned here likely didn't pass my judgment of the positive impact on the game vs. the cost of development, which means we have much better ideas to focus on right now.
There are tens of thousands of hours worth of tasks in the #s2-suggestions channel in just over a month, and judging which ones are worth the limited time we have is tough, so I have to rely on your votes to filter them out, and my judgment of whether they are impactful enough for the work they require, or whether they even fit my vision for the game. Minors are much easier because sometimes all it takes for me to see people talk about them, and I get excited enough to start working on them to include in the next weekly update, so I won't list planned minors in this document as I like to have much more flexibility with them.
I hope this helps answer questions about the future of the game. Seeing so much excitement has been fantastic, and I hope you'll find even more joy in the coming months. Let me know in the s2-suggestions on Discord if you think I still need to include some essential features. As I mentioned, the roadmap may change as better ideas come along the way.
Next week on Thursday, I think it's time for a new playable civilization. It's been long enough since we added one. Fun times ahead!
Till next time,
Artur
