Heya Railroad-Engineers!
We would like to give you the most important details for the next update.
The main reason for the next update (scheduled for the 17th of August at 7pm CEST) is pushing the technical base for the full-release-update for the game. The next update is neither the Early Access release, nor the final update. The release will be at some point soon but we can't give any specific information on that yet, except that we are also working on the Switch, PS4 and Xbox One port, which are planned to be released together, if possible.
The upcoming update is only a small subset of the new features we are planning for the Early Access release. The update will consist mostly of performance improvements, bug fixes, balancing updates, some new achievements, overall polishing, as well as a new owl character as mentioned before.
Due to the balancing and the technical changes we made, the new version will unfortunately be incompatible with existing savegames and replays and the highscore table will be branched off (meaning the old highscores will still be visible online but not ingame anymore). We are really sorry for that :( - we tried to keep compatability for as long as we could but it finally became infeasible to keep migrating all the old data. We will keep the current version on a separate branch on steam ("legacy-0.10-c2379ab4c" which can be accessed in the BETAS tab in the game properties in steam), so that if you wish to play the old version, you can still do so. Note that the update does not affect your in-game progress.
Above that, as mentioned previously, our publisher plans to adjust the price with this update due to the upcoming ending of the Early Access phase and we will provide a Demo version.
At this point we want to mention how happy we are about all players who joined our community and kept us motivated on working on the game and who helped us shaping and finding new ideas as well as bugs. Thanks to you, we made it thus already into the 11th month of our originally 6 month planned Early Access time. Also, since many players don't know us from the beginning, we want to make a small summary of what has changed in the game during that time:
- Savegames & Checkpoints
- Additional wagons & characters & emojis & ping tool
- Sandbox mode
- Single-player mode
- Achievements
- Online reconnecting & ability to join into running sessions, kicking, etc
- Online highscores with replays
- Accessibility options, widescreen support, new languages, etc
- Linux & macOS versions
- Balancing & Bug fixes & technical improvements
- And more to come soon :)
Thank you all,
Indoor Astronaut & Daedalic Entertainment