Dear Community,
Welcome to the lovely month of September! The end of the year is approaching, Autumn is just around the corner and even Christmas is coming sooner than you think (better prepare the gifts already!).
Today, we want to take the opportunity to announce our new development partner, our roadmap until mid of next year, and shine a light on our current team. Let’s dive right into it!
Welcome to the team, Black Sheep Studio!
Earlier this year, the fantastic French team at Black Sheep Studio took on the challenge to perform an extensive code review, going through the entire codebase of Railroads Online. And yes, they actually checked out every single line of code!
We felt right at home with Black Sheep which is why we now put the ink to paper and created a co-development partnership going forward! Our new friends will support the existing Railroads Online team from a technical perspective.
Speaking of the team…
Some of you repeatedly asked us how exactly the development process looks like currently and how big the team even is. We prepared a handy little graphic for you which hopefully answers a few questions:
As you can see, the entire team of Railroads Online consists of three different parties, all with their own unique roles and responsibilities.
These parties are:
The RO Development Team
Lead by Keume, they are from a development perspective responsible for everything content-related as they work on models, new features, research, and more. In addition they also manage the communication on Steam and Discord. Our moderators Goku, CaptainChooChoo, Kitsune and Sandy are happy to assist you in any matter and help with reporting bugs and feedback.
The astragon Entertainment Team
As a publisher, they organize marketing beats and host events like gamescom, tackle all communication efforts like public relations and social media, take care of sales, and also create stuff like announcements, screenshots and trailers. In addition, the producing team helps with guiding the project, backend works, localization and miscellaneous tasks. They are the direct contact between development and publishing and coordinate everything that has to do with builds, updates and QA together with the developers.
The Black Sheep Studio Team
Black Sheep Studio was founded in 2003 by veteran game developers and has been developing games of any style, any genre or complexity for more than 10 years; providing a wide range of services related to game development, such as complete game development from design to release, co-development or porting a game to another platform. They’ve cooperated with several well-known publishers in the past.
Black Sheep will be responsible for all technical work, stuff you can’t see at a glance. Their focus in the near future will be on refactoring while also providing programming assistance. In addition, they will improve the general UI of the game and take care of performance improvements and more at the same time.
Our new development roadmap
YES, it’s finally here! As our cooperation with Black Sheep begins, we have set up a little roadmap for ourselves which the teams will work on over the coming 9 months. Of course, even more stuff is planned and be assured that we’ll announce more about that once we can!
On the official Trello roadmap, we laid out seven big updates which are the following and are focused on quality of life and mechanics:
- Anniversary Update
- The Tutorial Update
- The Wiki Update
- The Map Update (feat. The UI Update)
- The Spline Update
- The Loading Screen Update
- The Rights & Alerts Update
You can check out the Trello for more information as we have already put in a few bullet points as a sneak-peek 👀
However, this is not all! In parallel, we’ll introduce much needed bug fixing and performance optimization updates in both single and multiplayer – while also releasing new content pieces, including vehicles, industries, vegetation and even more surprises. More details about that will also be announced as soon as we can!
And that's it for today! Have a good time in the valley and never stop shaping the world of Railroads Online ❤
Your Railroads Online Team
(PS.: We're working on a patch for the password session issue and hope to be able to release it soon!)