Banished fixes being worked on and mod tools still in the works

It’s been a few weeks now since Banished launched and the one man development team at Shining Rock Software has had his hands rather full since its release.

Luke Hodorowic has been a busy guy, and if you’ve been wondering what happened to the mod tools for the medieval city builder, then I’m afraid there is still no release date. As a one man team he’s realised that once a game has shipped there’s still a storage barn’s worth of work to do. Dealing with bugs, compatibility issues, press, well the list goes on.

Luke has also been required to spend some time working on one of his previous projects which helped fund Banished, a development tool product called Handplane.

He says he has toyed with the idea of bringing on more staff but it sounds like the “the complexities of expanding a business to have employees” are a hurdle for him at the moment.  Luke appears to be a little overwhelmed with the workload which can be attributed to the success of the game which topped the Steam charts on the week of its release. He added:

“The time after shipping a game is harder work than it looks on the surface. When I made console games, a game would ship, and I’d start coding on the next project before the discs hit the shelves. So my impression before Banished was released was that I’d be able to jump right into further development, prototyping new games, and have a general period of relaxation.”

Having played the game quiet literally to the death of all my citizens, I know many gamers who took the plunge with Banished are keen to see new content through the modding tools. It looks like these tools could take a little longer than some of us hoped but I think most players are quite happy to wait.