Thursday, July 1, 2021

State of the game

 This is a text that I put in the youtube account of the game. I reproduce it here:


I will try to answer those who are asking about the state of the game.

I'm still far from being able to offer a demo. The game is not playable, there is nothing to do except wander around the (mostly empty) map and fight NPCs without any objective. The dialogues are for testing. There is definitely nothing to do on the map yet, except run around and fight, which is what you see in the videos.


The quest system does not work, I have changed and added many things since I made the quest system time ago and now I have to redo it, in another way to make it more flexible and allow more things.

There are many errors regarding character navigation, they get stuck frequently, some systems like navigation inside of buildings takes too many resources. There are several navigation methods, apart of the engine native one, and it's complicated to make them to work fine in a 100 square kilometers map.

Many things are just started and with a lot to do, such as vehicles (boats, flying ships), or aquatic animals.

I have a growing list of bugs to fix, including some serious bugs that causes the game crashes.

There is a lot of work to do at the graphic thing. I need a lot of assets to place on the map, more buildings, improve the current ones. More clothes and to fix the current ones since the human models have been quite modified and the clothes no longer match. New models of weapons are needed, and some models of the aliens vehicles, as well as their clothes and buildings. More animations are needed, to fix some of the current ones.

It remains to populate the map, place the assets to build the cities, villages, fortifications, etc. Something that I'm pretty bad at, by the way.

And I don't have any 3D artist helping me with it.

In short, to offer a demo I would have to finish or almost finish many of these things, and I don't know how long it will take me to do it, because right now I'm working alone and it's a mountain of work just for me.

A AAA game takes a couple of years to be finished with a team of 100 or 200 people, full-time professionals. Babylon Project is not a AAA game far from it, neither can I work in it full time, nor can I produce like 10 or 20 people. Sorry if I'm taking too long, but that's reality and those are the numbers.

Regarding opening a Patreon or an Early Access, that's the plan. But if I did it right now, it would fail. I have seen many projects, good projects, failing when opening a Patreon or a Kickstarter, for not having enough promotion. For not being known.

Check out this video. It has about 1000 visits. It is little. A big thank you to all of you who follow the game, some for years. Thank you very much. But before opening a Patreon I should do a lot of publicity, multiply those 1000 visits by 10 or by 20, and then it would make sense open a Patreon. The game need to have thousands of followers to be able to tell you one day "I have opened a Patreon".

It is, as we say in Spain, the whiting that bites its tail, without financiation there are no people to help me, without people to help me, financiation fails.
And for now the only thing I can do is keep working on the game, without really knowing how far I'll go.