2022 recap and plans for 2023 (Patreon)

What a wonderful year 2022 was for Undead Legacy, that started off very frantically with me panicking and trying to fix up so many issues, that came with 2.5 release for A20 back in December of 2021.

The year started off with 2.5.22 update in January, that followed with 60 more patches after that in the course of five months, bringing it up to 2.5.82 Stable version in May, 2022, this alone took the major part of the first half of the year.

Soon after that I started work on 2.6, another major milestone, where I wanted to address the way material progression works with repair kits, the way you repair vehicles, explored how to create a questable POIs, how to add custom mobs, bring in a lot more content in terms of items, vehicles and other improvements to the core code of Undead Legacy.

And oh boy was I on for a ride there. 2.6 was quite a challenge and took 4 months get it out. While the update was followed by only 16 patches during the course of 2 months after first release of 2.6, bringing it to the current stable version of 2.6.17, they were jam packed with fixes and improvements, addressing a ton of bugs from before and more.

I really appreciate all the feedback, it's invaluable information, that allows me to make critical decisions as to what needs change, improvement and so on.

Here's some of the major change recap of what came with 2.6:

Scorpions
Not only I managed to add in a plethora of new content in terms of new weapons, items and vehicles, but also the scorpions, that people both hate and love in a good way, they certainly managed to accomplish my desired goal for their role in the game, which was making the Desert and Snow biomes more dangerous, but Wasteland biome even more scarier than it was.

Racetrack
With 2.6 also came the tier 5 racetrack and when I first started work on it, I was not prepared for the amount of work, that it would take to bring it to completion, but I'm glad I powered through it, creating a massive 150x100 large point of interest, where it's not just a boring simple track, but with decent amount of explorable areas and most importantly challenging enough to justify its existence in the game world, taking up so much of the land space

Recycling Station
I really disliked how the old Disassembly Station worked in the previous iterations of Undead Legacy, because the recyclable items cluttered the recipe list and I saw so much confusion around that, so one of the goals of 2.6 was to reimagine how you could break down items at a workstation and with it I also explored ways how to get something require electrical power to make it function, something that I'll explore more once I rework the Ore, Oil and other future extractor machines. With it also came the ability to break down ammo.
While it's not quite perfect, but functional at its current state, its code base will be improved with the upcoming 2.7 update, fixing some of the remaining bugs, that slipped during experimental testing.

Weapons and Vehicles
With 2.6 came a plethora of new weapons, both melee and ranged, and 3 new vehicles, which is just a small portion of planned content, that I want to bring into Undead Legacy, something that probably will never be enough, because you guys always want more ways to slay zombies and move around throughout the apocalypse in terms of vehicle variety.

New Vehicle repair system
I really didn't like how limiting the previous different kind of vehicle repair kits were, making it so that each car required the same kind of repair kit to be restored into a driveable state, so with 2.6 I wanted it to use a similar system to the workstation upgrade mechanic, where I could define different materials for different vehicle repairs, that way two similar sedan type vehicles could have different restoration cost, depending on the implicated gameplay balance, that came with them.

Chicken coops and Apiaries
I didn't want it to be as basic as just using eggs to craft the chicken coops, so it was quite an adventure to code in a way so that you would have to go and try to catch wild chicken to be able to craft them and I believe that brought quite an interesting gameplay addition to the game where people go out of their way to catch chickens to decide what to do with them later, be it for food or making the coops.

Misc things
Besides the things mentioned above, 2.6. brought in a bunch of miscellaneous changes and additions to the mod and I can't recall all of them.

What's next in 2023 and beyond?

New Research System
I've started work on new research system, that will finally replace the current placeholder way of researching things using the built in ingame crafting system, which is not ideal, because whenever you search for an item to craft, usually two recipes come up, one for the research and one for the item itself and it's always confusing to see that, especially for a new player to Undead Legacy

The new system will be its own unique, custom coded and design system with its own user interface, featuring a tree like structure with interconnected nodes, showing off the relationship between different unlocks. This will also declutter the crafting menu and it no longer will be the case of searching for something to craft and also seeing a schematic for it in the crafting list.

Hopefully the new change will also be more friendly to new players of Undead Legacy and make it clearer to see what's the potential progression capabilities of the overhauled crafting system in the mod.

More weapons and vehicles
As I stated before, those things are never enough, I also loved games like Mafia or Grand Theft Auto and I loved collecting different vehicles, so I can't wait to bring in more variety in that aspect. Also I will explore ways to add new bows and crossbows, a weapon category, that needs more love. Also ground work has been laid for future additions of laser based weapons and grenade launchers, more details about that will come later in the year.

More enemies
I haven't decided which type of enemy will be next, but it's definitely something I will explore more in 2023, because that's one of the aspects, that is severely lacking in variety.

Food rework
Yes, I am aware, a lot of you have been waiting for this for a very long time, myself included. I want to work on this, but I'll wait for Alpha 21 to come out and see from there where the rework could fall in line with in terms of development time.

Repairable flying vehicles
One of the things I want to explore sooner than later is making an airfield POI, with repairable planes and also way to find repairable helicopters in the world, so that traders wouldn't be the only way to obtain one.

And more
There's like hundreds and hundreds of things that I want to work on, but I haven't decided in what order I'll tackle them, but as time goes by, I'll have a clearer picture as to what's needed to be worked on before others.

Happy New Year!
I really, really appreciate and am very grateful for all the support! It allows me to keep doing what I'm doing! Thank you and I hope it's a great year for all of us!