Those who are still following our development have surely noticed that things are just taking comically long, and throughout most of the time, we've been dead quiet about whether Eiradir was even still being developed. Today I want to clean the slate and let you know how things have been going, where the delays are coming from, and how things are looking like today.

Let's start by going all the way back. Within three months of development, we had a workable basis for Eiradir, and those who were with us during that time will likely remember 2012 as Eiradir's golden age. However, this was also just around the time that Konrad got pregnant and I was finishing school, putting us into a position where I was more worried about my next IRL steps, and Konrad's time would soon be overtaken by being a father.

Progress went stale, and even after I had sorted my real life out, I was yearning to learn new things. The remaining tasks that this version of Eiradir had to offer were unable to scratch that itch. I was unhappy with the codebase, which much resembled a jam game made in 7 days, even though it was more like 7 months. I was also disheartened by our inability to onboard and retain the team of devs that joined, and was battling anxiety surrounding RP, which is counterproductive when working on a game entirely focused on roleplay. In an effort to rekindle the flame, we played around with a potential 3D version of Eiradir, which was also dropped shortly after, putting Eiradir to sleep for several years.

In this time, I have worked on and released many unrelated things, became one of the most downloaded Minecraft Modders, and started my computer science degree. There was a short period of time in 2016 where me and Nihilus tried to revive the original version, but it lost traction just a few months after. Eiradir was put to sleep for another year. 13:35 Sometime in 2017 I was experimenting around in the Unity Game Engine, and Eiradir, dead as it was, was still on my mind. A quick prototype emerged, and I got Nihilus and Konrad back on board. We spent the next two years working on this second iteration of Eiradir. The most notable differences were that this version was fully 3D, and that the map was no longer fully constricted to discrete tiles. We reached a satisfactory result, having most core features implemented, as well as a functional Tutorial Island that made Eiradir feel like a game for the first time.

However, good things would not last, and this time we were finding trouble on two fronts: the tools we had available for mapping the actual game world posed a hassle, making mapping progress slow to non-existent; but more importantly, Unity had progressively gotten worse with every update, to the point were it would take anywhere up to an hour to load the project or test changes. This was entirely on Unity and there wasn't much we could do about this at our stage of development other than attempting a large refactor to try and make our project work better with Unity's build processes. To this day Unity is aware of the performance problems and does not foresee a timely solution. Needless to say, endless iteration times did not make the mapping progress any more enjoyable. Eiradir slowly died and we went to focus on other things again.

This puts us into our current position. The reason I've been avoiding talking about Eiradir progress over these years is because it would be reasonable to expect much more progress and results after so much time has passed. But unfortunately, the only thing we have to show is some outdated screenshots of projects that are no longer running, and a huge amount of experience, including what not to do when trying to release a game. 13:35 That said, we do still want to create Eiradir, especially after the great turnout of Season 4 of our Project Zomboid roleplay server. This isn't a "we're giving up" post, it's more so an acknowledgment of "we know it's taking forever and it's indeed ridiculous"; so that when we do share further information or launch a server, you won't go in expecting to see the fruits of 12 hard years of work, because that's not how the fruits grew. :)

To end on a positive note: I did quit my job this year, and while I do have to occasionally shift my focus around, for the time being I am fully self-employed and can give Eiradir all the attention it needs. So to the Eiradirians that have been sticking with us, I hope to bring some better news soon.