Spirit World

Future Roadmap

I began my work on Spirit World in the final months of 2022. Four years later, I’m preparing to release the first alpha of what is ultimately an extremely ambitious, long-term project. The first three years of that development were lots of experimentation, trial-and-error, and rewriting of many of the game’s internal systems. Only in this last year did I really transition into content development mode and begin building out the game in earnest.

In summary — Building the first region took roughly three and a half years. Building the second and third regions took roughly three months. As such, my roadmapped objectives allow roughly three months of development for the base content for all future regions. Importantly, I fully intend to fill all regions, including these currently released regions, with much more content, as I work towards building a rich, interconnected world inspired largely by the content experience of Runescape.

AI

While I, like all Software Engineers, have adopted AI-assisted coding as a standard for writing code for the game, I am fully committed to keeping all artistic aspects of Spirit World entirely human-created. That means all Art, Music, Quests, Lore, Dialog, and Story will be entirely developed by humans. Some accommodations may be made for AI writing low-impact or informational writing when appropriate (hint text, simple notifications, etc), and for UI elements.

Spirit World’s Core Philosophy

Spirit World aims to marry the ambitious and novel content-web of Runescape and the attention-modulation of Runescape with real time combat, a more modern aesthetic, and deep and rewarding lore, world-building, and adventure. I believe that the MMO is an incredible vehicle for communal adventure, unique and interconnected gameplay mechanics, and meaningful longterm progress that rewards skill and effort. As such, I would say I am rather Anti-WoW in my design philosophy. Though I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with WoW’s game design, it does not interest me to build a game with short quests, simple goals, and ever-regurgitated content meant to promote ease-of-gameplay and hyperspeed leveling.

If I succeed in my effort, Spirit World should feel like a game you can make progress in for years and years, always finding new things to explore, new objectives to set, and new adventures to embark on. I intend for some quests to be extremely difficult, requiring on the order of months to complete, and for certain goals to be achieved only by the most dedicated players. I also intend for Spirit World to function at different levels of attention, meaning you can play it very actively, or casually on your second monitor.

Note: for anyone who has watched Marstead’s fantastic analysis of Runescape on YouTube, you may understand my objectives better than most. My goal is partially to make a Runelike, and partially to make something entirely original. With that in mind, I am not intent on creating a Runescape “clone,” but I do believe strongly in much of Runescape’s design philosophy, specifically Candy Loops, a large dependency map, and the interconnection of many skills together and varied ways to be rewarded with XP, skill-specific item upgrades, and novel options for interacting with the world. To do all of that, I need content. Lots of content. With that in mind, I intend to continue adding content to this game for the foreseeable future. That means if an area seems somewhat sparse, trust that I intend to fill it with more activity.

Roadmap

  • January 2027 — Queentree College (fourth region)
  • April 2027 — The Desert (fifth region, first PvP region)
  • July 2027 — Chillerport (sixth region)
  • October 2027 — Seventh Region
  • January 2028 — Eighth Region
  • April 2028 — Ninth and Final Region Before 1.0
  • August 2028 — Massive Content Balance, Content Additions, and Official 1.0 Release

Post 1.0

  • Ongoing — New Regions, New Content, Gameplay Balancing, and Further Updates