Introduction

Hey everyone!

In this post I'm introducing Capitalist Empire, write about a rough roadmap, future blog posts and what will happen next in its development. First off, let's talk about the current state of Capitalist Empire. The game is in active development, and I'm currently working on one of the largest features it has yet - Trains!

Trains will be implemented in Capitalist Empire similar to how they work in factorio or openttd. You'll be able to place rails and signals. Trains will use signals to check if a train is driving in front of them in order to avoid collisions. They will also give players the ability to limit railways to a specific direction.

The implementation is still being worked on, but there is first progress to show:

Please excuse the terrible "programmer art" models and User Interface, it is subject of change and will be completely overhauled before the first release 😜

Trains will be used to transport large amounts of goods large distances. They are the exact counterpart of road transport vehicles which can transport small amounts of goods for smaller distances. While playing the game you'll be able to combine the strengths of both types of vehicles to create an efficient and cost-effective transportation system for your goods.

I'm still experimenting with how exactly you will be able to use the vehicles in game and there is not much yet set in stone. Currently, they can be used in a kind of automatic logistics system where you only define which goods should end up in which building and the network does figure out the rest itself.

In parallel to the trains implementation I'm currently working on overhauling every 3d model in the game. The models I originally created were only placeholders, and they look quite terrible 😀

For comparison here you can see the old and new version of a tier 1 residential house:

Each model will be replaced with a new version till the prototype will be declared finished, which should result in a much nicer overall look for the game.

I've spent the past several months with carefully thinking about how to approach a public release of a prototype, demo, preview or whatever you may call it. The roadmap will be divided into 3 stages:

• Stage 1: Prototype
• Stage 2: itch.io public release
• Stage 3: Steam public release

The feature set required for the prototype is pretty much set in stone and the majority of it is already done. It's mostly needing polishing and overhaul of the 3d art as well as the user interface. I haven't decided yet whether the prototype will be released publicly, but it will most likely at least initially be a closed testing round.

After the prototype testing is over the next milestone will be a release on itch.io. The features included in this version are not decided yet and this will strongly depend on the feedback from prototype testing. The reason for going to itch.io first is that it has a smaller, usually more dedicated, audience which should lead to better feedback as the range of testers increased before the final push.

The steam release as early access will be the last milestone in the currently planned roadmap, and it has a lot of features queued which I didn't even roughly design yet. This milestone is most likely still years ahead as of today and I haven't planned anything related to it yet - just that it's going to happen.

I will keep you all updated on the development progress from now on via devlogs. I'll write a blog post whenever I got something new to show and talk about the designs behind it, implementation details and anything else that may be interesting to someone. For now there isn't much more to talk about.

Have a nice day!