Hi all,
With another stable release out, we're thinking about what to work on next. Please note we are already busy lots of smaller projects, like better documentation around monetisation and improving platform support - this is just to find out what you all think about the next major feature you'd most like to see. We do plan to ultimately implement all of these, so hopefully it's just a matter of which comes first.
Please also note we won't definitely implement whichever option gets the most votes. This is so you can let us know what you want, which will be an important factor in to our decision about what to develop next, but there is no guarantee we will actually implement things in the order of popularity here. (There's lots of factors to take in to account like the difficulty of implementation, which platfoms support it, commercial value of features, etc.)
Some notes about the options:
- a debugger should allow for deep inspection of all aspects of the game at runtime, hopefully with also the ability to step through events and actions one by one whilst watching what happens to variables.
- real-time multiplayer is marked as "difficult!" since from what we've researched about networking, this will both be complicated to support, and also probably be pretty difficult to use properly even once supported, and possibly not supported on a broad set of platforms at first (may just be Firefox/Chrome browser until support improves). Making multiplayer games is hard, and it probably won't be a simple case of adding a "multiplayer" plugin or behavior - you'll probably need to design your game from the ground up with a fairly specific architecture, and be aware of some important aspects of networking theory. You should only vote for this choice if you're aware of this, and feel like you'd be up for the difficult challenge of designing an efficient multiplayer game.
- better tilemap support refers to being able to easily edit tilemaps from within the layout view, as well as hopefully importing popular tilemap formats, perhaps with some extra behaviors to help make tile based games easy to design
- modularity features refers to being able to do something like make custom plugins from events alone, add events to containers, sharing pre-built bundles of useful events, or enhancing function support. We're not sure exactly what this would look like, but it could benefit large projects and allow sharing event-based "modules" in the community.
- "find references" means a tool which allows you to search a project and list all places an object, file, or some other aspect of the project is used, and possibly automatically list/remove things which are not referenced anywhere. This could be helpful for large projects.
- "port the editor" means getting the editor to run on more platforms, e.g. Mac/Linux. I'm not really sure how practical it would be for us to take this on right now since we're a very small team (3 of us) with a lot to do already, but I threw it in to see if it gets many votes.
- we also have over 50 smaller suggestions which we don't count as major features on our todo list. If you'd rather we worked on adding as many of these as possible instead of a major feature, choose "general minor improvements".
- if you choose "something else", post below! However please note we're thinking about major features here - we already have loads of smaller suggestions and people often suggest things already on the todo list!
Vote away! :)