Fantastic Pixel Castle is Building Ghost's Foundation, and the Team Talks How 2025 Will Be Different

Fantastic Pixel Castle has its first podcast episode of 2025, and in addition to talk of game development and managing a remote team on a project like Ghost, we get an overview of what is set to be a big year for the MMO’s development.

Johnson and Greg Street are joined by FPC’s Director of Production, Juno. They start with a discussion of what producers do, and more on how they manage to keep cohesive development with a remote team. Johnson says a combat designer might know we need monsters and design how to fight them, but without input from the narrative team, they could be making different games. Organized collaboration, including  thorough documentation and effective asynchronous communication are keys to making it happen. 

There's more to this discussion that is worth a listen, but many of us want to know what exactly is coming in 2025 for Ghost. 

The game is still in the pre-production phase and they're working on the pipeline, building things out on a level that they compare to laying down a very solid foundation for a house. It takes time, and it takes careful work, but once they build it out, they can build out the more complex content faster and more efficiently. 

FPC has been pretty transparent and sometimes potentially too transparent. Considering it’s early and much will change, Street even wonders if part of their mitigation plan will be “we have to talk less”. He says that they have a game to make and can't just be talking about making a game because then we'll have nothing to play.  They seem to be working out a balance in transparency and expectations.

“The challenge for us will be that we can keep the small community we're building up interested,” Street says, and mentions plans to share more of the world, including art from the FPC team.  It won't be the finished product, but we'll get to see more from the team and what they're building  instead of placeholders. Another important part of development they're working on is getting the database up and running. That in place will also increase efficiency.

Street talks about how they are preparing for this next phase where the concept phase and everything before your building out feels like nothing is off limits and you can just dream big. Now,  as they move toward prototyping and additional technical milestones, it's like taking those visions and needing to come back down to earth a bit.

Related:

Interview: Chatting With FPC's Greg Street About Ghost MMO Testing, Blue Zones, And 2025

The full, hour-long conversation is worth it if you want to know more about their approach. They also dive into topics like progression, its complexities, and how vital it is to get that right. Their goals are to make an immersive world that feels engaging and alive. The red zones are planned as areas filled with other players, and as places you want to return to that are dynamic and more engaging. Objectives will change and there will be other things to discover. You won't be shuffling from a hub or a lobby to a location and back again, then repeating it. 

2025 is set to be one of building, shoring up that foundation, and then building even more on top of that, it's promising that we'll start getting assets from the team that will give a peek into the directions they're going.