It’s the start of a new year, and it’s going to be another big one here at dot big bang. So there’s no time like the present to tell you all what we’re planning to bring to you in 2024!
There are loads of new creator features in the pipeline, including the terrain editor, a reworked social layer, a dedicated store, a grants program for developers, a script importer, and lots more. Read on to find out more!
Friends, Presence & Ephemeral Accounts
In early 2024 we’ll bring some great updates to the social aspects of dot big bang to make it a much more fun place to hang out with your friends.
First up will be a friends system so you will be able to find and link up with your friends on dot big bang. Combined with our presence system you’ll be able to see what they are doing and join them easily.
We’ll also be improving our sign up process so it’ll be easier to get your friends on board by introducing ephemeral accounts. This means all your friends activity will be properly saved before they take the plunge and register a real account and once done, everything they’ve done will transfer over to their real account. This will also open up the ability to make games and objects without needing an account!
Later in the year we’ll also expand our sign-in options to cover Discord and Twitch logins making it even easier to jump aboard.
For creators we’ll also have a social script API so you’ll be able to make compelling social games.
Dedicated Store
Coming very soon is a new iteration of the dot big bang store where you’ll be able to find loads of great skins to buy. We’ll continue to improve this as we go forward and it will be part of the backbone to allow creators to monetize their work on dot big bang.
Grants Program, Creator Monetization & Creator Competitions
Over the next year to complement our existing art and game jams we want to make creator success more tangible. Our first game making competition with paid prizes will be launching in the early part of the year. Later we will also being to unveil our grants program where creators will be able to apply for various grants to make games on dot big bang. Successful applicants will be paid and get access to a variety of extra support and promotion by working directly with our Community Developers!
Later in the year we will also be unveiling our broader monetization program. Access will initially be by invitation but we will make the scope and terms public so people can see our offering. We think you’ll love it!
None of this will impact our grass roots support for all the creators in our community, or our fun events that are run without the pressure of prizes.
Groups & Versioning
Coming in the first half of 2024 we will be making development for small teams working on live games much more straightforward. To start with we will be introducing a publishing step. This will let you work on your game carefree without worrying about breaking features for people playing it. When you’re ready, you can simply hit the publish button and the live version played by our community will be updated. Then you can immediately being working on the next version!
To complement this we will be introducing the ability for groups of creators to work together across a range of shared assets. As well as making it much easier to edit a game without the owner being online it’ll also give you access to the groups other resources like templates.
Terrain
The terrain system has been cooking on dot big bang for some time. Many of our games have been using it but we wanted to improve the editing experience and performance before unleashing it to everyone.
Thankfully that time is nearly upon us and next year we’ll be giving everyone access to the powerful abilities it has. The ability to sculpt in 3D goes way beyond making compelling landscapes as games like Preston’s Diamond Dropper show.
Later in the year we’ll also be opening up terrain editing to our scripting API allowing you to design games around the ability to modify the terrain!
Scripting
Updates to our scripting workflow have been coming thick and fast this year and we want to continue that in 2024. Our headline feature coming in the next year is script imports! This widely sort after feature will let creators import scripts inside other scripts like the module system of most programming languages which will open up a lot of possibilities for code sharing and reuse in their games.
We’ll also continue to improve our APIs with improvements to Sound, UI and Debugging coming early in 2024.
Editors
As well as overhauling our editors to support all of the exciting features like Versioning and Terrain already mentioned we’ll continue improving them in their own right!
Coming soon will be the ability to lock entities to prevent accidental changes to them whilst using the game editor.
Over the next year we will also improve our new Fast Console, allow grouping of entities, improve the range of multiplayer editing capabilities and add multi-entity templates!
Engine & Rendering
Our engine is currently undergoing some architectural changes that should give us a boost in performance over 2024 as work continues. We’ve already shipped some improvements and should add some more early in 2024.
Our renderer has also been improved recently. We’ve improved the quality of shadows for the player and reduced the rendering artifacts for shadows more generally. Coming very soon are improvements to our bloom that make it significantly more beautiful.
Over 2024 we also should bring you; skinned meshes with voxel frame animation, a depth of field post-processing effect, support for foliage and instanced meshes.
More research work will also be undertaken to improve our renderer performance and capabilities.
New Games
In 2024 our Community Developers will continue to develop new games in-house as well as supporting our creator community. We currently have one game approaching completion, and two untitled projects underway.
The new game you’ll see first this year is a completely reworked version of the ever-popular Hub World. It’s a new map that uses terrain to great effect, and contains new quests, gameplay, activities, vehicles, new NPCs, and more. Look out for it going live soon!
Also in early development is an untitled survival game that will initially appear in the form of a kit for creators so they can bootstrap their own game. We’ll also likely take this further and release a fully fledged survival game of our own later in the year.
We’re also working on a roleplaying/life-sim game where players will be able to get together, socialize and customize their part of the world.
Expect playable prototypes to be shared with the community early on in 2024 and join our Discord if you want to be part of our early access testing groups for these games!
Beyond these larger games we will continue to make smaller examples, kits to help people get started and support all of our creators in their endeavors.
Disclaimers!
This roadmap is not everything that we’re doing, there’s a load of other stuff as well. Please ask about anything near and dear to you – we appreciate feedback and it helps us shape our plans!
This is all planned for 2024, but plans can occasionally change and shuffle around in timeline. We’ll keep you updated with what’s going live in our regular changelog posts about the latest dot big bang releases.
Feel free to join our Discord and follow our social media to hear about new announcements first, and to let us know if there are features you’d like to see – and happy new year!