So now that Blockland has been successfully launched on Steam it does have a couple of implications for RTB. The most obvious of those being that Steam offers some viable alternatives to RTB's chat and add-on hosting - that being Steam chat and Workshop.
I'll start by saying that RTB will continue development however following a brief discussion with Badspot we're going to be looking to develop RTB in an official capacity (meaning it's officially endorsed by Blockland and may even be offered as a DLC on the store page depending on how things play out). This does mean RTB will possibly be getting a name change or the "return to blockland" bit will just be dropped so we have a meaningless RTB acronym. More information on all of that later.
As for RTB's existing feature set - I think chat and add-on hosting can still offer things that Steam can't because it's such a purpose-built solution for Blockland's situation and that's just something Steam won't be able to compete with. It does however mean we could possibly do away with RTB logins and just use Steam accounts in the future which would be cool.
The road map for RTB is currently as follows:
- New "official" save hosting/gallery system.
- Re-writing of dedicated hosting.
- Re-writing of chat.
- Re-writing of add-on hosting.
Essentially it's a big old rewrite because a lot of the code currently in place is around 4-5 years old and it's starting to creak. We'll be discussing each of those rewrites as they occur because we'd also be looking to implement more relevant and useful functionality based on the however many years RTB's been around.
The new save hosting/gallery is what we've determined to offer the most immediate value to Blockland users so it's something we'll be prioritising.
Read more about what we're doing with that here.Anyway, that's pretty much all I've got to say but I'd like to hear feedback on what you guys think and also any ideas you've got for the future direction of RTB.
