With the launch of First Contact, you may be wondering “what’s next?” I’ve been thinking about the same thing. This game has been a lot of fun to make and its community is great, but its success has made me want to take on something a bit more ambitious, something that I can treat as a product.

This leaves me with two paths: I can either start designing and building a game from scratch in a professional game engine, or I can figure out some way to treat KeyStone as more of a product. Both sound exciting in their own ways, but I’d like to discuss the “KeyStone as a product” idea in this post.

There are a lot of cool things I’d love KeyStone to have:

More cards. This is the most obvious and possibly the most exciting. I have a long list of themes and ideas for sets that are all really exciting. I’d like to do a small overhaul of the game modes. I’d rename “Casual” to “Arranged Teams” and make it give the winning team 60 credits (right now “Casual” awards 40 credits win or lose). I’d add Ranked 2v2 and a 1v1 mode. I’d make the Deck Editor mode multiplayer for people who want to group up and make decks together. I would like to create a simple AI and use it in two places. First, when a player quits early, the AI would take over. Second, you could add AI players in the “Arranged Teams” mode. This feature could also lay the groundwork for a co-op mode. I’d like to clean up the turn order, especially the order that card effects execute, and make it available in game. Right now the order is roughly (1) all unit cards that start with “Send ___” create the units mentioned in their first sentence; (2) all other effects occur in random order. This leads to some weird interactions that people label as “bugs” that are really the game working exactly as designed, but with a bad, unintuitive design. For example, the effect on “Raynor, Rebel” that creates the Marines occurs after the main “send” statement of the card. This means that the “Marine creation” part of the card goes into the random order. So if you play “Stimpack” on the same turn, it’s totally random whether the extra Marines get created before or after the Stimpack buff is applied.

The thing about all this is that it takes a lot of time. A new set takes maybe 2-3 hours per card, which comes to 4-6 weeks of work if this is my full time job (it’s not, I have one of those too!). If I had to do some estimates on the other features, overhauling the game modes would take 8 hours, a simple AI would take 24 hours, and cleaning up the turn order would take 40 hours.

Staring this much work in the face, you can see how it starts to become tempting to put that time into a product. But is it possible to make KeyStone into that product? I certainly would not want to take away from the game’s fundamental free-to-play nature.

The closest thing I can think is to launch a small crowd-funding campaign to deliver some or all of these features, complete with stretch goals and in-game rewards for being a backer.

I’d love to know what fans of the game think of all of this. I’ve put together a survey where you can let me know what features and backer rewards are most interesting, and whether you would consider becoming a backer at all. Take the survey here!

And as always, if you have more thoughts you’d like to share feel free to post in the comments below.