Let me say that I can understand the frustration, we are well aware that only a once there's an actual game we can be getting a bigger exposure and all that.
OT was always primarily developed as an engine, because obviously using it for just a single game would be a waste. However, developing an engine with this ambition is by no means an easy task. Normally it would have been developed in secrecy and revealed only a moment before becoming ready, but of course that would require a large amount of funds and contacts throughout the industry, which we didn't have.
With Anteworld and the tech demo release we wanted to show people and developers that:
- this tech itself is not a vaporware
- allow people to get their hands on it early, play with it and provide feedback
- also get some additional income so we are able to continue without selling souls to someone
We could not be selling it as an engine to the users, and we knew that we needed to make it a game to get people interested. As it was released, we thought mainly the people who wanted to support us and the development will be buying it, and it's indeed so for most. That doesn't mean we aren't on to making the game - we definitely do, but we still had a huge amount of work to be done on the engine functionality itself before we could proceed on to the game. It's expected that once there's an actual gameplay it will become more widely known. Right now we are mostly attracting tech enthusiasts and simulator people, which make a relatively tiny part of the user spectrum.
You must realize that the games you are comparing us to use existing engines, they can focus on the game itself as they don't have to deal with the engine development. Planet Explorers uses Unity, and that means they can kick start fast, but they can never reach the scale with it (they don't intend to, which is absolutely ok).
If we wanted to make just another game on a stock engine, it would be already released, but it wouldn't be able to perform as OT does. Plus we don't want to make just another game limited by the capabilities of common engines. Do you?
Right now the development goes in a couple of directions:
- engine work that's necessary in order to be able to implement game functionality, all the scripting and physics stuff
- actual game play functionality, or something close to it (coming next week a release with FPS mode and explosives/rt craters)
- work needed for our licensees that provide us the income we need to continue working
The past year was mostly the engine work, we weren't happy with the progress presentable to our users. This year should bring much more active content, please be patient with us a bit more - we believe the end result will be worth it, and OT will become the basis for many games/sims.