Roadmap: the direction, and the things we have ruled out

Stage Engine is a desktop app for Mac and Windows. Both platforms ship, released together. Godot is bundled inside, so the game you build is a real Godot project and it runs locally on your own machine.

The work splits two ways. You build the world by hand with manual controls: terrain, water, weather, placement. Director 1 writes the code, as GDScript, inside your project. You play the result and say whether it is right.

Building needs an internet connection because Director 1, asset generation and world data all come over the network. Playing the game does not.

Published dates on unbuilt features are a way of making promises with no cost attached, and they age badly. We would rather say what direction the work is going in and let the releases speak for what has actually landed.

The changelog is the honest record. It lists what shipped, which is the only version of a roadmap that cannot be wrong.

More of the world becomes something you can grab. Every part of a game that has a shape, a position or a feel should have a control attached to it rather than requiring a sentence. The measure of progress is how much of your world you can build with your hands.

Quality problems get solved by building capability, not by reaching for a bigger AI model. If something the tool produces is not good enough, the answer is a better control or a better capability underneath, because that is what holds up as projects get larger.

And it stays general. No genre templates, no catalogue of supported game types, no list of allowed things. A feature that only works for the example in the demo is not finished.

Cloud building and GPU streaming. This was considered and cancelled. Games run on your machine, and that is a decision rather than a stage we are passing through.

A browser version of the builder. The reason to install is the frame budget, and a browser version would forfeit exactly the thing that makes the tool worth installing.

An offline mode. The AI and the world data are network services and there is no honest way around that, so there will be no degraded offline build pretending otherwise.

Team and enterprise plans. This is a desktop app one person installs. Free, Indie at $10 a month and Pro at $50, differing in usage.

Specific complaints from playing your own game are the most useful thing anyone sends. "The terrain tool cannot make a cliff steep enough" is worth more than a feature request, because it names a limit that showed up in real work.

Being non-technical does not disqualify you from that. You are the one playing the game and deciding whether it is right, which makes your judgement the input that matters most.

Mac and Windows go out together and are treated as equals. A fix that lands on one is not finished until it lands on the other, and a result measured on one machine is not a verdict about the other.

This costs us time on every release and it is worth it. A tool where one platform quietly lags is a tool where half the people using it are second-class, and they can tell.

The changelog names the versions for both. If a release is listed, it exists and it is downloadable, which is a lower bar than most roadmap language and a much more useful one.