It's finally the end of the year, and as much as I'd love to keep working on Dredgers, I know I'll burn myself out if I don't take a holiday, as I've been working about 13 months on end without much in the way of holidays. (In all honestly, I'm quite burnt out already, but the hype from launch has kept me going) So after the next small patch, game development will be paused for about 2-3 weeks. So my plans for next year are not 100% set in stone, but I have an idea of what I'd like to do: The first and major thing is rewriting the item system. The way the system currently works is that each item has values that are loaded from code when the item is created. This means that, unless I create an item, I cannot get any info about it. Obviously this is quite bad, but I never realised it'd be an issue when I first coded items. Items are fairly complicated and a big part of dredgers, so re-coding them is going to be possibly the biggest batch of work I've done so far. However, once items are moved to a database format, it'll greatly improve my ability to work with them, allowing things like translations, saving, better craft/prefixes, etc. Secondly, speaking of crafting, I'd like to work on crafting after items are rewritten. I have a few ideas on how to make it far more interesting, rather than a generic 'select item from list and craft it'. The idea is to make crafting a process, and depending on what you do during the process, the quality of the item is changed. So for instance using extra metal during crafting will make the item reinforced, or taking a break to save hunger may result in the quality being worse. I have other ideas for cooking, enchanting, scribing, etc, but those aren't quite as fleshed out yet. Thirdly, translations. Translations are sort of a problem for me, while I'd like to add a translation system so the game can be translated, I can't particularly afford translation fees due to how much text the game has. Not only that, but officially supporting translations would terribly slow down the game's development, since I have to wait for the newest update to get translated before pushing every update. So as a result, while I want to add a translation system, I simply cannot imagine supporting official translations. I'm thinking of adding workshop support for language files, that way people could download player made translations for their language. Fourth, Saves. Saves have been heavily requested by a lot of players. I must admit, I feel saves are a lot more work than they are worth. Thankfully, the item rewrite will make it easier. Saves will probably only be possible in between levels, since having to completely save level data would be a nightmare. These are the major plans I have, and since they are plans they may change, naturally. You may also notice I haven't mentioned what I talked about in the previous news post: memory/mind, classes and themed content update. Specifically for memory/mind, I was not happy with how the system was shaping out so I've put it back for now. I do still want to add it, but I need to figure out a better/non-clunky way of doing it. Rank 2 and 3 Classes is still a goal, but it's long term and will happen over time. The class HUD and learning screen rewrite over the last few updates has brought me closer to getting there. A themed content update is still being planned, but I feel like I should be nailing down fundamental systems like items first before adding more content. This is just a smarter way of doing things so that I don't waste time redoing work that I could have done after. Overall my goal is to work on Dredgers and keep improving it. While I do make plans, I like being able to change them on the fly as I find things with higher priority, rather than sticking with a plan for the sake of it. I also know people have been asking for new content, and while I really want to add it myself, I know it'll be smarter to get the game systems into a better state before I start diving into new content. Thanks for reading and playing the game, hope you've enjoyed, See ya next year!