Roadmap

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Shadowrun Awakened is taking an iterative and incremental approach to building its Game Applications and Assets. For this project, we will be tracking overall goals with "milestones", a set of criteria that allows us to monitor progress by categorizing the stages of growth in the project.

Current Milestone

The current milestone is Alpha. The first big step for alpha is creating prototypes for each application, integrating necessary third-party technology, and building basic assets for putting characters into the world.

Shadowrun: Arena Brawl

This is a demo of our engine and proving ground for the mechanics to be incorporated into the final game.

In the world of Shadowrun, there is an "extreme sport" that was born on the street. It is a violent version of capture the flag called Urban Brawl. When played indoors, the game is referred to as "Arena Brawl". As a goal for our Alpha version of SRA, we will produce a simple version of this game, playable on prototype client and server applications. It will feature competitive play against player or computer controlled teams over a LAN. In many ways, this game will be similar to multi-player games such as Unreal Tournament or Counter-Strike.

This game offers opportunities to implement many of our game mechanics such as Astral Space, Combat, and Sneaking. The complete list is available on the Alpha Milestone article. Also, it allows us to isolate many of the technical problems away from the game mechanics and community-level problems. We foresee "Shadowrun: Arena Brawl" being the proof of concept for much of our gameplay and a good way to attract interest and genuine confidence from the community.

Milestones

The foreseeable long-term goals of the project have been broken up into the following large steps:

• Alpha - Once we have enough features from the Game mechanics to operate a minimally functional game then we will have arrived at this milestone. The prototype requirements are outlined as Shadowrun Arena Brawl, a capture the flag game using rules originally laid in the Shadowrun universe. This prototype will focus on game mechanics and technical hurtles, not community building or scalable requirements. This includes refining a process to move content from the minds of developers, through assets, and into the game.

• Beta - Once we have 1 complete storyline, some open play elements, and a resilient and reliable system, we will go live with a server and start with invitation-based persistent play. This is our first impression with the community. During this time, we want to not only stress test the technology, but numerous assumptions made during the process of constructing game mechanics. We should be somewhat stubborn to change here, despite the fact that we want to test our hypotheses; remember that every variable we change in the system takes time to not only change (development time), but also the change may take time to take effect in the community. During this time, worldwide resets should be accepted as a possibility as we begin to make numerous tweaks. The activity of having a Beta testing period is obviously for yet more quality. Beta may move into an open format eventually. Open source projects and free games are known for having interminable Beta programs, so we want special attention paid here to ensuring we continue to make forward progress in development in addition to tuning our system.

• Version 1.0 - All core game mechanics and requirements fulfilled in software. This is when we realize the complete product functioning in software incorporating all three feature lists for 1.0. This includes 3 complete storylines in game content, plus a rich diversity of open play elements. The massive Player versus Player concept, unless affected by findings during Beta, should be implemented by the formal realization of Version 1.0, even if it arrives as a final cycle in Beta.

• Version 2.0 - This describes the concurrent process of always re-examining 1.0 and adding more mechanics and content to flesh out the game for a larger and larger community. Within the project, 2.0 is often used as a bucket to toss in ideas that are good, but not fundamental to SR. "Version 2.0: for the eventualities, not necessities".