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Greetings!
First of all, happy New Year! We hope your New Year is off to a good start. We’re very grateful for how exciting last year has been for our studio. There are big plans for this new year and we are sure that it will be too for the great community of They Are Billions. Now, let's talk about the development of TAB, What are we working on right now?
The Level Editor
We continue expanding and improving the game level editor as it has proved to be very successful amongst the community. There are already more than 500 levels published, some of them really complex and sophisticated. We're amazed of what you’ve achieved so far, thank you very much guys!
Step by step, we will include more and more features, assets, and interesting new elements to enhance your awesome designs. Some things we are working on are the modding of game rules (all the game stats and parameters), new interactive assets, and more ornament assets to decorate your levels.
Also we are going to allow users to create campaign-like series of levels where the player must play them in order, so they need to finish the first one to unlock the second, and go on. That will be very useful to those great series you are creating so you can make sure the player is following the levels and the narrative in the order decided by the designer. We are also considering to incorporate some kind of persistent state through the series that can be used to create things like branched stories.
The Campaign
This is the big challenge for this year! We know you have lots of questions about it, let us answer some of the most common ones.
What happens with the Campaign, Why it is so delayed?
First, let me say that we really understand your impatience. The launch of the Campaign has been delayed from our first estimations, so we fully understand you can be a bit disappointed. But, be aware that all this extra time means that we are developing a much more ambitious Campaign than we originally planned. Given the success of TAB, we feel the responsibility to develop the best possible game. We've just got one chance to release the full finished game, and we would honestly prefer to be known as the ‘slow developers’ that have released a great RTS, than the ‘rushed developers’ with an average game.
Think that the Campaign is going to be like a new full game with 40-50 hours of content! We have literally created hundreds of new graphics for the Campaign. Indeed, the investment in the Campaign has been much larger than for all the Survival Mode.
When can we test and play the Campaign?
We’ve decided not to partially release the campaign under Early Access, but release it fully at the same time that we officially launch the game out of Early Access. We will perform all the testing internally here with our team of testers and, of course, we will keep on updating you about the campaign details here. We believe is better not to release the campaign "in pieces" as it would delay the development, and it would spoil everything. We want to surprise you with the full Campaign :)
Will the Survival Mode be expanded?
Yes. The current Survival Mode will receive two new map themes very soon. One will be the easiest one, and will be the first to be played, and the other that will become the hardest one to play, even more than the Desolated Wasteland. These will the biggest expansions to the Survival Mode until the Campaign is finished. We will give you more details about them in the next update.
Will there be more units in the game?
Definitely yes. We have already several new infected ready and, right now, we are working on the Empire Heroes. All of them are been reserved for the Campaign. There will also be new upgrades that players can research in the Campaign, like the Laser Titan. Once the Campaign is released we are thinking about adding new game modes and integrating some elements of the Campaign to the Survival. That’s the future we are working on!
And here some more images from the Campaign, hope you like them:
Next update we will talk about the Research System in the Campaign. See you soon!