Early Access and Beyond: Road to Official Release

19 Jul 2023Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Dear Agents!

Get ready for your mission to save Section 13, the most important and confidential asset S2P owns!

[Early Access Start Time]

KST, JST: July 20th 8am
CST: July 20th 7am
GMT: July 19th 11pm
CEST: July 20th 1am
PDT: July 19th 4pm
EDT: July 19th 7pm

Before we open up the mission for you, we would like to remind everyone that it’s still in Early Access and the scope of your mission will evolve over time. Before we talk about how it would evolve, let’s discuss the scope of current mission we have for you.

[Day 1 Early Access Content]

For Early Access, you can expect the following for accomplishing your mission:

5 different levels to clear: Parking Lot Level, Lobby Level, Office Level, Deep Storage Level, Isolation Chamber Level.
One mid boss creature: Exosuit to eliminate.
15 different creatures to Eliminate.
12 weapons to unlock using blueprints.

Firearm Type (Red): 5 (Assault Rifle, Submachine Gun, Pump-Action Shotgun, Sniper Rifle, and Revolver).
Psionic Type (Purple): 3 (Arc Cannon, Photon Cannon, and Sawed-Off Shotgun).
Bionic Type (Green): 2 (Plasmoid Launcher and Flamethrower).
R&D Type (Yellow): 2 (Minigun and Tactical Crossbow).

Data Nug system to enhance your agents permanently.
Nethercubes to open and enhance your agents by stacking up Synaptic Enhancements during your mission.
Test Mission: Swarm Defense Mode to test your skills.

And we are planning to evolve the game for the next 6-9 months. We do have plans for how we want to evolve it, but as the purpose of Early Access is to develop the game with the community, we want to hear from all the agents and find the best way to finish the game. But we do have an initial plan based on the feedback we have collected from betas and Steam Next Fest, and we would like to share them as a reference so that you can set up the right expectations on what to look forward to.

[Development Roadmap]

As you can see, we have lots of updates planned out including “Agent Ability System Expansion” and “Melee Weapon System” which can change the overall style of gameplay, and regularly add more weapons, Synaptic Enhancements, new agents, more levels, and final boss! The overall schedule can be changed based on the feedback we see, and the type of improvements and balance changes we make, but the goal is to release the game within 1st Half of 2024.

For the immediate future, our focus will be on making each agent more unique and will be adding more weapons and Synaptic Enhancements for diverse gameplay experiences! We will share when we are updating them as we get closer to the update.

As we have always done, all the feedback we get from Early Access will be reviewed and future plans and the schedule can be changed based on them. So please join the community and share your thoughts!

We will be sharing updates regularly with our development progress and plans, so please stay tuned.

- Jungsoo Lee

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2111870/Blackout_Protocol/