The Age of Polish is a milestone that is reached when the features that do exist have been sufficiently polished. All half-baked features or half-balanced features that do exist will have been fully baked. ;-)
This milestone keeps reminding me of the cleanup required.
Once Repixture has entered The Age of Polish, new features should be added with care and only after they have been polished and playtested and balanced.
The Age of Polish precedes The Golden Age.
The Golden Age
The Golden Age is a symbolic milestone which basically symbolizes my overall vision with Repixture. It is a long-term milestone, the grand vision of the game, something to be proud of.
The Golden Age cannot be reached before The Age of Polish has been reached.
Hard requirements for The Golden Age:
- ALL known bugs fixed (except for small engine bugs with no reasonable workaround)
- ALL TODO's/FIXME's in the code are either fixed or discarded
- The quality checklist in Minetest Wiki has been walked through (do this when everyone else works)
- Multiplayer at least superficially tested to have no obvious flaws
- Full protection support is still working
- All APIs are (still) documented
- Works with latest Minetest stable
- Experimental/hacky code is dumped in favor of compability with Minetest
- Game stands completely on its own without mods
Soft, subjective requirements for The Golden Age:
- Feature parity with Minetest Game (see: https://codeberg.org/Wuzzy/Repixture/projects/2556)
- Depth: Basically, all gameplay features that do exist, have a depth to keep you busy for some time
- Functional mobs
- Beautiful mapgen, nice to look at
- Diverse mapgen: A lot of places to explore, exploring in every direction is rewarding
- Try to avoid repetitions
- Variation within the same biome is also needed (i.e. special biome-specific structures could help)
- "in every direction": This includes cave, sky, underwater areas. No area should feel "empty" / "undesigned"
- MUST have enough vehicles
- Good sound design
- Different sounds for different events, avoid re-using the same sound over and over
- Rare and unusual things
- Events, items, nodes, mobs, etc. that only occur with a low chance, makes you happy if you find them.
- Playable in all spawn points: No matter where you spawn, it should be roughly equally difficult. (hard biomes might be banned from being spawn points)
- Creativity: Enough blocks to keep you busy. Includes block variants like color
- Simplicity: The game should not become a feature creep with 1,000 different game mechanics. This also implies maintainability
- Coherent design (everything makes sense with everything)
- Beginner-friendly: Game is accessible to those who are new to the genre (needs playtest)
- Main menu / GUI fully designed
- Player documentation is reasonably complete (should be player-tested at least once)
As a reminder, here's the core gameplay loop:
- Mine / fight (basic items)
- Explore / Loot (advanced items)
- Build (here, creative options become important)
- Craft / smelt
- Upgrade (better weapons, armor, etc.)
- Stockpile (collecting LOTs of items, includes farming and trading)
- Achieve (the achievement system)
Each area should offer enough content to keep the game interesting and diverse.
Non-requirements:
- Great multiplayer features (leave that for external mods / severs to figure out for now)
Note the point of Repixture is not to be completely feature-packed, it is meant to have a simplistic base but have lots of content.