Q2 Progression Update 1

Hi!

I think now is a good time for the first Q2 update, so here's an overview what has been going on with the early access development lately.

For the past few months, I have mostly been working on three different categories:

• Map preparations,

• Contractors / outsourcing,

• First playable,

When it comes to this first topic, the most important and time critical thing for the early access is building the "commercial maps" which means rebuilding pretty much everything map related.

This topic is also heavily tied to optimization and AI since these new maps have 4x the playable area, so there needs to be much more focus on making sure everything stays fairly optimized.

Along with these upcoming new maps, I have spent quite a lot of time "ironing out" some of the demo issues which were mostly related to collisions and visual nuances.

These new commercial maps should feel much more polished in terms of physics and they should look more coherent related to assets, textures and other visual elements.

When it comes to the word "map preparations" here's what I mean by this. It's really important that I have a robust set of editor / development tools available when I start implementing all these new maps at bulk.

In other words, making these new expanded maps should feel "easy to handle", so I need to have all the necessary tools to automate certain elements and workflows that can be easily replicated.

Currently I have one commercial map (Apartments) pretty much ready and now when I have all the necessary tools / workflows also in place, I can start working the other maps with a certain level of confidence that there will be no surprises.

Topic number two (Contractors) means that I want to have most of the outsourcing done as soon as possible, since the quicker I get all the contractor related tasks done, then there's less unpredictability for the early access timeline.

In other words, when all the contractor tasks are done, then it's only up to me and I can easily estimate how long each remaining development task will take from me. Currently there's few different contractor areas still active and most of the remaining ones are related to voice acting and animations.

Voice acting is going really great and I'm pretty sure that all of the necessary voice lines will be completed at the end of this month. Animations however are going to be a bit more tricky since there's only one contractor available for those but there's always an option to cut something for later if the timeline for implementing all of the animations becomes unrealistic.

Then the last topic is what I referred as "First playable". First playable in this context means the first gameplay experience that combines all the necessary core components to a playable form. Since this commercial branch for RtV is a totally different project and basically all the core systems have been modified one way or another, there haven't yet been a gameplay experience like in the demo that I would consider first playable for the early access.

However with this first commercial map (Apartments), now there's a possibility to create that first playable, since pretty much all the new features are ready to be tested in that map.

My goal is to have this first playable test ready either at the end of this month or early next month. I will be recording some sort of raw gameplay video from this to the YT-channel and this video should then showcase all the new features like voice acting, expanded map areas, dynamic elements and so on in a gameplay context.

I will also share some kind of development build from this test here on Patreon to get some early feedback.

Once the first playable experience has been tested, then the entire summer is going to be all about maps, maps and more maps.

Once I have enough maps ready, then I will start planning that Steam Next Fest demo which is most likely going to be in October.

-Antti (Developer)