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So, 2023 is in full swing, and this year, we really want to grow First Dark Dev as both a modding studio and independent game developer/publisher. While nothing is ever easy, and money will always be a problem, the first step is a plan of action, and working towards the goals of those plans!

Overall Goals for this year

Our overall goal this year, is to give new and upcoming creators a voice and a platform to get them noticed! While FDD itself is not a very well known group, we do have an insane amount of website traffic across out platform that we want to use to promote “smaller” creators.

We want to see someone going from that “Initial Commit” to “Hey Guys, we have reached our first 1000 downloads!”. We want to see creators grow their skill and community.

How do we plan to do this?

Well, the first and most important part is we want to help modders and developers start out. We urge our community to send struggling creators our way, so we can see how we can support them and help them grow.

The second phase involves the launch of FD Networks. A replacement to Exploding Creeper Group, that is aimed at promoting developers, rather than ourselves. This will include FD Networks Creator Corner. A platform were developers can share and publish their projects. This will be linked to an “advertising” system. Now, we say adverts, but it’s not really ads. It’s more a system that shows banners of projects and creators on our platform, across the entire FDD platform. So if someone is reading our docs, they might see a small, non intrusive banner, promoting the work of “Kaleidio (a partner of FDD)”. This will also include promotions on our Curseforge/Modrinth pages (if allowed, we still have to check into this), twitter, discord and Youtube.

Roadmap

February 2023

First plan for February is staff restructuring on our Discord. People come and go, and real life sometimes take over. That’s why we’re going to be assessing our Moderators and Support staff. We will be opening up moderator applications, as well as look into getting more support staff.

April 2023

In April, we want to launch a Prototype (or “alpha”) of our very first game to be released under First Dark Development. More details on this in the coming months

May 2023

In March of 2023, we want to replace our aging, and very broken Arcano bot with a brand new bot. This bot will be primarily focused on FDD and partner servers, but we’ll discuss the public use of the bot later.

June 2023

June will probably be the busiest month of the all. In June, we will be upgrading and replacing a lot of our FDD infrastructure. This includes the botpanel, our jenkins, maven etc. Everything will be upgraded, cleaned up and “modernized”. We’ll also take this time to go through bottlenecks and things causing issues on our server and take the time to address them.

August 2023

The release of Hyper Lighting 2 and CraterLib. Yes, Hyper Lighting 2 was supposed to release in 2022, but things got in the way. This year we want to bring on more team members to assist in development, texturing and testing to get this released and ready!

We will Likely also announce the development of Simple RPC v4. A brand new version of Simple RPC, written from the ground up. (Will this finally be the time we go open-source? We’ll have to wait and see).

September 2023

We’ll consider the addition of a second server, which will solely be used for FD Networks and Partners. We’ll also look at upgrading our web hosting offering. More details on this later in the year.

November 2023

We want to look at hosting a virtual dev con event. Similar to Modfest, but less Minecraft focused. Details on this will follow later

December 2023

The death of Exploding Creeper Group. This will be the month everything still connected to Exploding Creeper group, that wasn’t moved to FD Networks will stop working. The explodingcreeper.me domain will finally be cancelled and shut down.

At this time, we’ll also look at our budget for 2024 and see how we go forward from there!

Thanks again to everyone for their support and making it possible for us to be able to do all this! You guys rock!