Greetings Scrappers!
The first half of 2025 has been exceedingly busy for us at 301. We launched our JUNK! Playtest in January, attended GDC 2025 in March, launched the JUNK! Demo in May, and took part in Next Fest in June, introducing the game to new players and our small but mighty community at every step of the way. I'm so very appreciative of everyone who's downloaded our game and played a few rounds, and even more thankful to those who have provided feedback so that JUNK! starts becoming the best version of itself.
With all of this said, we’re only just getting started. I want to share some details regarding our development roadmap for the second half of 2025, and what we're hoping to accomplish.
We're currently working on an overhaul to our matchmaking system and are building out a way for players to create and join custom lobbies. This will let Scrappers challenge their friends directly so that they aren't waiting to see if a lobby opens or constantly battling against the AI opponents. The matchmaking overhaul will likely be rolled out in phases as some parts of this process are easier/faster to implement than others. We'll be sure to communicate what feature is launching when and with clear details on how each addition or change works.
We're building a proper single player ladder-style campaign. Similar to classic fighting games from the 90s, where the player battles against a pre-set order of increasingly difficult opponents in specific settings, our single player mode will act as a way for Scrappers to experience each arena and opponent all while the difficulty and rewards increase as they fight closer and closer to becoming a League champion.
We have a handful of new robot characters in development that Scrappers will be able to choose from. As they're completed and included in the game, we'll be reworking the Shop so that Scrappers will be able to choose an initial, free robot from our list of characters. Afterward, the rest of the characters will need to be unlocked in-game, the same as abilities are currently.
It's our goal to finalize our demo's feature set and then begin shifting over to our Early Access phase by the end of the year. I don't want to promise specific dates on when this will happen, but upon the Early Access launch, the JUNK! demo version will limit future updates to bug fixes and performance updates, and JUNK!'s Early Access version will be the where new robots, arenas, paint jobs, abilities, etc. will be released. To be clear, if we decide to overhaul things like the game's UI or reward systems, obviously those updates will be included in future versions of our Demo release. It's our intention to build the very best introduction to our game as possible, where players can come back again and again, challenge their friends, upgrade their robots, explore new and novel environments, and have a lot of fun.
Thank you all for coming on this journey with us! We'll share more updates as we update our demo and prepare for Early Access, and we hope you enjoy playing JUNK! as much as we enjoy making it.
-William (Project Director @ 301)