Hello everyone! I’ve been quiet on here for a while so I thought I would swing by and let everyone know that I’m still breathing. My crew and I have been making some good progress on FP2 behind the curtain, and we’ve just started to fly our voice actors down to Texas to record the dialog. I haven’t been showing off much of the game because I really want it to feel like something near-complete when I record gameplay footage. What I can say though is that I genuinely feel like FP2 is leaps and bounds ahead of FP1 at this point in its development.
Of course I have something else I wanted to talk about instead – the DLC for Freedom Planet 1.
I plan on making a more public announcement about this soon when I have solid dates, but I’m postponing DLC work indefinitely while I work on ports to additional consoles. The good news? Freedom Planet is coming to a new console in the future. Which one it is shall remain a mystery for the time being.
The bad news? At this point, Freedom Planet’s engine is in a state where I worry about what adding extra content would do to the original experience. With that in mind, I have an idea I wanted to run by the Kickstarter backers who may be floating around here.
I am considering breaking off the DLC characters into their own standalone games that are more simplistic than Freedom Planet but better suited for their unique abilities and story perspective. There’s a couple reasons for this.
The first reason is that our initial contract with MP2 Games has been fulfilled, so if we want to update the game any further from this point, we’ll need create a new contract which involves paying out extra money. It makes sense of course; MP2 has moved on to other projects and they need to be fairly compensated for taking up extra time to come back and help us. It does of course bring an economic factor into all of this which complicates my ability to keep adding content to FP1.
The second reason is that I’m not happy with how Torque plays in the existing stages. He feels wonderful in his intro stage because it’s designed specifically for his abilities and weapons, but he feels unwieldy elsewhere. This is one of the reasons why I planned for him to have a lot more schmup segments than the other characters, but that doesn’t mask the less-than-ideal experience of his platforming stages. It’s less of a problem for Spade but he still has a few trouble spots, and I would also have to give him new bosses in many of the existing stages since it doesn’t make sense for him to have to fight some of them.
Putting the characters into new games would allow me to use a new engine so I wouldn’t have to rely on a third party for ports, and I can comfortably switch to text-based dialog so I don’t have to worry about the availability of the voice actors. I can also reuse art assets from FP1 to cut down on development time.
Again, this is just something that’s been on my mind and I don’t know if I’ll go through with it yet. It might be better to just keep working with Spade and Torque as FP1 DLC, but I figured I’d put my thoughts out there so that our backers know where things stand right now.
Cheers~
– Stephen
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