Year 2023 is almost here and it's time to enter our time machine and explore the good and bad things of 2022. Ready? Let's go!
The bad and unexpected
Working on a new game is always an incredible adventure as well as an intensive challenge. Especially if the game in question is your first and your company is made of two people and a half.
During this year, we had to accomplish a long list of features and improvements and create the game from the beginning towards the most important milestone of them all: release Roboplant in early access on Steam at the end of November 2022.
The good news is that we managed to do it all with many coffees and long days of work. The bad news is that when we released the game, there were bugs we hadn't noticed and this made the gaming experience not very pleasant for lots of you. We apologised and we want to apologise again. Being the first game that our tiny team has ever worked on, there were things we wrongly took lightly and undervalued. We learnt a lot from our mistakes and we also understood how incredible a community of players can be. Through your feedback and suggestions, we were able to improve many aspects of the game, see things from other perspectives and thus become better game developers and designers. So even if the early access release was a bit bumpy, we are still on this incredible adventure and we can’t wait to keep working on Roboplant together with you.
The good and appreciated
Despite the bad and unexpected events of 2022, the list of good things is a very long one! Since January, we have managed to achieve all the milestone in the roadmap and provide our gamers with new game features, new hydroponic systems, customized robots, a new planet covered in ice and…well, the list goes on and on. But instead of listing all the stuff we were able to introduce in the game, we would like to say a big thank you to all the people who showed an interest in Roboplant, played it, criticized it or loved it. We would like to thank the ones who invited us to game events and gave us the opportunity to promote our project; our social media followers and our discord friends. And lastly, we would like to say the biggest thank you to the people who bought the game in early access: we are working on a special surprise just for you.
What’s next and new year’s resolutions
We are very excited about the first game updates of 2023 and we can’t wait to receive your first impressions and feedback. To simplify things for you, here’s a list of what this new update will include:
Planetary events
To Spice things up we are going to add environmental events both for planet Maylo and Kytoon. This means that while you are building your hydroponic empire, you need to watch out for storms of different kinds that could bring harm to your factory.
Build your rooms more freely
Say goodbye to corridor constraints! Now you can position the room of your choice wherever you like without the need to connect it to a corridor.
Robots will get stuck much less
That’s a big promise, but we want to stick to it. We will explain how in the first article of January.
And what about resolutions for 2023? The first one is related to bugs and game improvements. We want you to enjoy the game 100% and in order to make this possible, we want to improve the game testing process and have a better idea of what’s working and what’s not. Secondly, we need to work harder on our marketing strategy: reach more people on social media, attend more events and discover new ways we can promote Roboplant. Lastly, we want to make sure to follow our roadmap and release all the features we’ve planned. We know it’s not going to be easy, but it’ll be worth it.
Before ending this article, we want to share with you what is probably the best gift we ever received for Christmas thanks to our wonderful 3D artist Alessia. A gift that once again reminded us how incredible the adventure of making Roboplant is.
Happy New Year and see you soon for the next amazing update!