Original post by the game's lead developer — @Tyron.
Dear Extraordinary Survivalists
As with every year, spring time means gardening for Saraty and me. It was a cold spring here in Latvia, which compressed most of the gardening efforts into the month of May. Conveniently it coincided with us needing a break after the strenuous efforts of the 1.22 release. But now, the time has come to refocus on Vintage Story.
As much as I'd love to just jump neck deep into the game engine to code 1.23 content, there are currently other tasks in greater need of my attention. The first task: Showing you all what we're up to! (even though the team wasn't exactly helpful with that 🙃)
1. Story Trailer
It's about time – four years have passed since our previous game trailer – we've begun production on a new trailer in earnest. In fact, several team members will travel to our offices in Latvia in the hopes of getting the gears turning on this! Our previous trailers were all about showing off as much gameplay as possible while using 100% ingame footage. This time we'd like to try something different and tell you about the game's story in a more cinematic format; in fact it might not use ingame footage at all, we haven't fully decided yet. We will still showcase what you will actually do in the game though. The fantastic NeddyTheNoodle joined us to build out the scenes for us. The storyboard is nearing completion, elvas will begin building the relevant scenes soon and Neddy is currently tuning the visual style.
2. Logo rework
As mentioned in the art rebrand post we've begun a broader effort of finding a more consistent visual language for Vintage Story. Your feedback was very valuable to us and so we went back to the drawing board based on the lovely fan impression of the logo by Phobiak. Once we got that nailed down, we'd begin applying this new visual style to all our platforms, hopefully. Thank you for everyone's ideas and suggestions!
3. Pilot Project: Creator Program
We'll also be launching a new pilot project – a creator program for our fellow community members that diligently create content for Vintage Story. A new team member was added for this task. We will announce more on this soon!
4. VS Mod DB – Additional filtering
The recent controversy around AI generated content has not gone unnoticed by the team and we've been thinking of a solution on how to address it. Our current plan is a form of "individualized self moderation" – allow players to report content as "AI / Low effort content" and conversely let them set a threshold after how many reports they want these mods to no longer appear in their mod list. This should create a level playing field where every visitor has a choice on whether they want to see low effort content or not.
5. New site: VS Server DB
In parallel Rennorb is also working on a proper web version of the public servers list where server authors can take ownership of their servers and edit their server information in a user friendly manner. Search functions and categorization should help with server discovery, giving players a more straightforward way to find the right servers. This is likely to be released this year.
6. The 1.23 update
This is the big one. Believe it or not lads, the team has decided that Combat should be a focus for the next big update. Here's what we want to look into: tighter, more visceral hit detection; more varied attack animations; possibly a rework of armor and weapon tiers; a few more weapon types; and more!
The combat changes will be in good hands – we have Maltiez, author of the Combat Overhaul mod, on our team to advise us, we abducted the infamous SaltyWater to help us with animations, and conveniently we just received new combat hit detection technology from the Glint team as they are also currently working on combat \\o/.
Balduranne has descended deep into a major armor rework as teased in #devlog. There will still be three armor slots, but each piece can be built up in layers.
Dana, Pizza2004, Sekelsta and Maltiez have been active in doing code cleanup, bug fixing and improving mod support. Tagwin has completed the inventory sound project, adding over 200 new sounds to the player's inventory. Redram has embarked on a pixel density consistency journey, ensuring items are about the same size whether held, dropped or placed, and has now moved on to more rideable creatures. Arkaik has been diligently pixeling more berry bush variants and new foliage types. Luke is writing lore, Hayden is tasked with creating music for our trailer and viv has begun animating cats. Though disclaimer, we don't know yet which of this work will make it into the next major update. As for elvas, has anybody seen him? I think he's asleep on the keyboard 😁
More is planned for 1.23 but we will not reveal that just yet. In parallel, the story team will begin preparing for 1.24, which will bring Lore Chapter 3 to Vintage Story. We have no ETA yet for either 1.23 or 1.24.
Anego Studios Project "Glint"
The Glint team is hopping forward in great strides toward a playable experience. Apart from the aforementioned combat hitbox technology and various other secret new systems, they have also built their own entity AI system that's easier to work with and continue maturing their much more immersive graphical user interfaces. There is a decent chance that we can share the first visuals of the world of Project Glint this year. Either this year or next year we will be building a wholly separate community for Project Glint.
Anego Studios Project "Nex"
Our little action RPG project is also progressing continuously. Clovergruff recently finished building the foundation of the game and is now primarily focused on creating content. Here as well we should be able to show something off this year.
Summary
We spent the time since the 1.22 release stepping back, reflecting and planning ahead. Anego Studios has always been a multi-project undertaking and today is no different. A multitude of ideas have turned into concrete plans, and those plans are now set in motion. We will continue our relentless pursuit of building the best survival voxel game that we can. Thanks for playing Vintage Story and stay tuned! 💚