Hi, everyone.
When we decided to join Steam Game Festival, we wanted to give more people a chance to try Timberborn ahead of the upcoming Early Access launch.
What happened over the last three weeks blew us out of the water.
Close to a hundred thousand people downloaded the demo. The beavers were catapulted to the front page of the Festival and, according to our knowledge, Timberborn’s demo remained one of the three Festival demos with the highest concurrent player numbers. At some point, over 28 thousand people were watching Timberborn live on Twitch.
Our Discord and forums exploded, and the feedback started flooding from all directions. We want to thank you for all the kind words, valuable suggestions, and valid criticisms.
We’re still chewing through it but since today was going to be the last day of the demo’s availability, we would like to let you know what’s going to happen in light of these events.
We decided to postpone the Early Access launch to later this year but we’re keeping the demo up.
Early Access launch
Our plan was to release Timberborn in Early Access by the end of March, but after discussions with the team last week, we decided to push it back. We want to incorporate as much of the demo feedback as possible, but there’s just seven of us at Mechanistry and we do not want to crunch. Your response to the demo was a huge vote of confidence but it also made us realize that the game can and should become something bigger than we previously thought.
We know some of you might be disappointed, especially if you’ve been following us for a while, perhaps even since alpha. We believe, however, that this is better both for the game and the team. We love Timberborn. We want to enjoy the Early Access with you instead of pushing for a release now and then falling flat on our snouts, exhausted and burnt out, with a game that doesn’t meet your expectations.
Because of that, we are changing the Early Access launch date to “2021”. Please note that while this might sound like “Holidays 2021”, we hope to get Timberborn out much sooner.
What are we going to do with the additional time?
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of what we’re planning to do before we deem Timberborn ready for Early Access launch.
- We’ll have at least two different factions with different style, unique buildings, and gameplay traits. You already heard the rumours about the Iron Teeth, right?
- We’ll expand the water-related gameplay. It's clear you enjoy dams and water physics, and we want to build on that.
- We’ll improve the game’s performance. We want to see hundreds of beavers running their errands without the game having a hiccup, and it’s a huge undertaking.
- We’ll fix the overpopulation problem. There are ways to control the colony's numbers better than forcing your beavers to sleep on the ground.
- We’ll add better work prioritization – it’s by far the most requested feature.
- We’ll improve the in-game UI.
- We’ll translate the game into 10 languages besides English.
What happens to the demo?
The demo is staying on Steam for the time being. Even though the Early Access is our focus now, we will occasionally update the demo, so please keep your suggestions and bug reports coming.
Thank you!
Once again, big “thank you” for all the feedback we’ve got from you – we can't wait until we share the results with you. It wasn't easy to postpone the launch, but we are hoping that you’ll understand our decision. Your support is what keeps us going.
~Team Timberborn, a.k.a. Mechanistry
PS If you would like to talk to us directly, hop on our Discord channel and/or join us for one of the live streams we have scheduled for this month. You'll find these on the Steam page, but also on our Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook.
- February 19th, 2 PM GMT – per your request, Michal and Jon will return with the internal Timberborn build to answer your questions and play with a non-demo beaver settlement.
- February 24th, 2 PM GMT – you wanted to see more behind-the-scenes content, so we'll have a stream focused on the map editor, with Jon designing a map live, taking suggestions from the chat.
- February 26th, 1 PM GMT – after their successful "no carrots, the monument at the peak of the map" run, Jon will take up a different challenge in the demo.