Hi.

Where have you been?
So 2020 was a steaming pile of s--t, I think we can all agree on that.
2021 still has some stink to it but we're definitely seeing the light.
The first part of 2020, I think we did ok with updates. However, the last 6 months have been insanely busy and challenging for us. With an extra level of ridiculousness in Jan/Feb when we had a bunch of unexpected things drop in our laps like massive power outages in Texas (where Tim currently resides) and horribly dire family news (f--k cancer). I wouldn't say any one thing was thee thing but it was more a build up especially when you add all the other "unique" parts of this last year.

Speaking on my own here, I've been doing game dev professionally for like 16-17 years, I've seen my fair share of crazy game development and this by far has been the wildest. Thankfully, I have my family right beside me. Literally. My son sits next to me doing zoom calls for school, while my daughter runs downstairs to show me her drawings. I enjoy getting to see them more however it certainly makes time management and focus a bit trickier. Typically, when you are shipping a game you see your friends/family a little less and your co-workers a little more as work intensifies. This has been the polar opposite, it's definitely not how I envisioned shipping my first game as a new studio...let alone any game really but here we are!

Sooo life is tough but is the game done?
Thankfully, we've reached our content complete check list early this month and are dealing with the final polish passes and final feedback. So yes, the game is "done". As of this week, we passed certification on Xbox One, and PS4/PS5 have been certified for a while now. There are a couple Kickstarter reward key things on the PS4/PS5 side but the big certification stuff is done. Which is a massive relief. I think a lot of people forget that we're releasing the game on consoles as well...without a publisher, or a third party dev studio doing the ports. We're only three core devs working on all of that. So what does that mean? It means Chien pretty much by himself has been handling PS4/Xbox One and PS5 development. While Tim and I pressed on adding all the new content, and features to the game for our v1.0 launch. This also includes the recent PS5 trailers, store page setups all of which have been a substantial amount of work in an of itself.

What's going to be in v1.0 launch?
A lot actually. There are the final boss battles that were pretty huge accomplishments both technically and content wise for us. We also were able to squeeze in quite a bit from our backlog of tasks as well as adding in quite a bit of new content focusing around story/lore/quest/collectibles. In some ways, it might feel like an expansion pack for those that have already played the current Early Access version. So we're pretty proud of what we accomplished thus far.

Optimizations/Polish
Recently, we ran a couple more hefty optimization tasks focused around our destructible tech that are pretty kick ass for both console and PC. It was a fairly significant overhaul and to complete this work meant we'd need to hold back an intended Early Access Xmas release with the 7th boss and combine it with the overall v1.0 release. This also helped us focus on the remaining v1.0 content which I think most people want anyways.

Q1 2021? You said it was done...SHIP IT NOW!
In fall of 2020, we had put out a trailer for PS5 announcement, with an estimate for a Q1 2021 v1.0 launch out of Early Access. We're close to that expected window. Actually, we could've shipped this March possibly earlier even with all the crap we dealt with but we figured it best to polish this a bit more instead of releasing a build hot off the presses. I'd update our estimate to put us in mid/end April window. I mean again it's an estimate especially given how this year has been but it's definitely close as we're content complete, we are through certification for PS4/PS5/Xbox One and we're in the process of getting the console keys for our Kickstarter backers setup. So it's a matter of polishing out those game spots, getting our launch trailer prepped and the final global regions ready for launch.

The game is not "dead", development is probably the busiest we've ever been! There are days where we're dead tired and even then we're still pumped about making this the best it can be...don't even get me started all the things we want to do after releasing out of Early Access. O.O

Thanks again for your patience we're almost there!
Brian