It has been a while, no question about that, where we promised to fix a couple of things in Early Days, especially the achievements.
We haven’t done it not because we were lazy though. We actually fixed the achievements and some other things around September last year. And then the trouble started. After failing 4 internal tests during the next 2 months or so and revisiting the problem over and over again, because the fixes we borrowed from the full version of the game, caused issues elsewhere, we had to admit to ourselves that this doesn’t lead anywhere.
There is only a certain amount of time and resources we can allow ourselves to spend on a free product and no matter how we looked it, the time and effort needed was just outside that scope.
On the other hand, we really wanted to fix these things as the prologue to Gas Station Simulator is still quite popular.
Long story short, starting with the new year we decided we need a different approach and do it properly. While the achievement and various bug fixes would be nice, we weren’t entirely happy due to missing out all the optimizations and improvements we did for the full game over the past year anyway.
So we decided to approach it differently and revamp the entire Early Days prologue to match the codebase of the full game. All the things we fixed, improved and optimized in the full game will go into Early Days now. The prologue will remain the same in scope, but now it will match the full game in terms of improvements.
As it turns out, we did a lot in Gas Station Simulator since we released Early Days and we added small things at the start here and there. So the revamped prologue will be a lot better. There is however one downside to this approach: as it looks right now, we are unlikely to be able to convert your old save games to be used in the revamped prologue. There are just so many new tweaks, that as of now we don’t have an idea how to make it happen. On the other hand, that is the only downside, everything is else is going to be so much better!
We do not have an exact release date for the revamped prologue just yet, but it’s already in internal testing and doing very well so far. To give you at least a raw estimate, think along the lines of a couple of weeks. Yes, we know, more waiting, but at least we are close. And hey, maybe you’d like to fill that time with a look at the prologue to our Winter Survival that gets release later today:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2175210/Winter_Survival_Prologue/