Hey Vaudevillans!
It's been an intense few months since this game went from being an interesting niche Early Access title to an internet sensation overnight. It happened on the 15th of July when I was travelling with my daughter on a train from Germany to Italy very early in the morning. I opened the Steam stats page and there was a huge spike in sales and dozens of new people on the Discord channel. They explained to me that a very famous streamer was playing our game right then and had been doing it for hours and loved it. And then another big streamer followed, and another...
After a few hours, the game was so popular that the servers that host the generative dialogue service were overloaded and stopped working. At that point, Bumblebee Studios was basically me, Simone.
There were people who helped me with various tasks from time to time, but it was still a one-man team. I spent the next 24 hours trying to reach the service provider and answering people on Discord. Most of the users were very understanding and had very kind words for me, but the sour reviews had already started to appear on Steam.
You know the rest of the story: it all worked out in the end, so here we are.
Over the last two months, we have been working hard to consolidate both Vaudeville and Bumblebee Studios. There is a new partner in the company and new collaborators, to be announced soon, who are already working to improve and add content to the game.
Some of the updates released since the Early Access launch include the on-screen notebook, smarter characters, improved performance and stability, compatibility with DirectX 11 and Vulkan, connection error handling and support for 12 languages!
But we still have a long way to go before we leave Early Access. Thanks to the incredible support of this community and the fresh ideas of the new team members, we have big plans for the future. Look forward to improved graphics, new environments and characters, expanded and alternate storylines, more music, improved usability and accessibility, new features, and many, many other exciting improvements.
Thanks again for your support!
Simone Odoardi and the team at Bumblebee Studios
