You Exist to Build Great Things

Plans for 2017 and Regular Progress Reports

It's 2017. Foxescraft stopped operating in 2012. That's 5 years. I more or less stopped work on Buildocracy in 2013. That's 4 years.

So why now? What's different?

Until recently, I did not have several key components I needed to create Buildocracy as I imagined it.

To give you some examples;

I did not possess the skills I needed to make something that wasn't just "Minecraft with slopes". I needed to be able to manage something of sufficient complexity that I could build a galaxy-scale city-building MMO where you can have entire planets with thousands of cities, each having potentially millions of inhabitants, buildings, machines, etc all while not having thousands of software engineers too. At this point I have been living in Silicon Valley for almost six years and in that time I have worked for five different startups, read many books on various programming languages and watched thousands of hours of both software engineering and architecture talks. Over the last year, I have been designing a game architecture that will allow me to make Builodcracy as I see it, which includes some tools and techniques that were less common or did not exist back in 2011. Which brings me to the next point...

I did not possess the tools I needed to make Buildocracy in such a way that allowed me to rapidly develop and scale it. Let me explain what that means. Let us say I want to tweak some aspect of the land generation algorithm. Previously, this meant I would change some code, compile, then launch the game to see the result. This takes a good 60 seconds from typing to looking at it. That might sound OK, but when you are trying to explore various permutations, this is very slow. Virtually all aspects of development of Buildocracy would work this way. But this is no longer the case. I have stumbled upon some tools which allow me to change land generation algorithms and see the result in less than a second. This technique can be applied to how machines work, etc. Many of these tools come from the functional programming paradigm, which while having been around for a very long time, has become more popular in the past few years. Many of the techniques and tools relating to functional programming are an excellent fit for event-driven, procedural games like Buildocracy. Moreover, scaling the game such that a single city could not only run 24/7, but also hold thousands of players and a near limitless number of machines, buildings and NPCs becomes much easier using many of the newer cloud-based services like AWS Lambda, which did not exist in 2011. With the recent advent of cheap, easily available VR headsets, there is nothing really stopping me from making this into a VR game as well. In addition, many of the "models" I was previously using in the game were hand coded as a series of coordinates. This generally not how this is done at all, and I have begun working with programs like Blender to generate high and low res models for use in the game.

I did not posses sufficient funds I needed to both have a dedicated space, free from distractions in which I can code for hours at a time nor the ability to work full time on Buildocracy. From 2011 to 2013, when I actively worked on the game, I had two separate rooms, one dedicated to coding, in a quiet house with a stress free job. From 2013 until 2016, none of these were the case. I had a series of stressful jobs, and lived in a cramped place with several loud and annoying people. This living situation is the primary reason development was halted. Today I earn enough in the Bay Area to have a large place all to myself, I have a new job which is relatively stress free, and one of the companies I worked for went public (IPO), so soon here I will have a very reasonable warchest which could mean I make Buildocracy my day job for months or years or for a very long time.

I did not possess a reasonable plan for monetization. Yes, eventually I will have to charge money for the game because servers cost money, my food and housing cost money, etc. I did not want some flat fee structure where everyone pays a subscription nor did I want a "pay to play" system where those with deep pockets can ruin the game. I have come up with several vectors for funding, none of which are required to play, and some of which reward players for creating. For example, you could sell, for real money, the rights to blueprints which allow other players to re-create something you have built in game. I am still in the process of thinking through all the details, but in some form or another, Buildocracy will have a free to play option.

• Finalize game architecture, technology tree and game mechanics
  
• Begin work on new procedural planet generation system, NPC and machine system, game client and game server
  
• Publish regular progress updates
  
• Move to Los Angeles, CA...
  
• Release alpha clients on a regular basis
  
• Possibly begin working on the game full time without any other day job

In order to keep everyone up to date, and to help keep me on track, I will be releasing regular progress reports like I did before, but with a twist. Instead of posting them as text on here, I am planning on making more into a YouTube-based vlog-style thing. This will allow me to show the progress and is easier to digest than my wall of text type posts... Look for these sometime in the new few months.