Hello to all of you. I know many of you are angry at us and you have a full right to be. A lot of things did not go well on our side, so I would like to explain a few things.
What is going on with Race To Mars?
Same as usual - we're still working on it, currently harder than ever. The upcoming update should arrive soon and it will contain a lot of new stuff.
If it's going so well, what went wrong?
We were overwhelmed by RTM's success on Early Access. Riding your enthusiasm, we decided to fix pretty much every game element - visuals, music, add more hardware, more things, more great elements...
Which ate into our time very hard. What's more, we had to verify parts of our earlier assumptions. Worse still, our techadvisor fell seriously ill, having been and still being in a hospital, which dramatically decreased his working capability. Unfortunately, we lack his deep technical expertise to bring many of the elements to life. This unfortunately gave us more weeks of delays.
Unfortunately, preparations for the Apollo Update aren't going as well as we would like, too, but we definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel and today we are practically sure that we will be able to prepare it in a good state for the middle of September. We will probably be able to add a lot of things that originally weren't meant to be in it, but thanks to the extra time, we can.
Where to find optimistic news then? There's a lot and I hope that they will at least in part recompensate your disappointment over the speed of our work on the game.
First, we are now a much more stable and experienced company than we were half a year ago. We started work in a four-person squad with little experience, and now we have sometimes even 16 people working for our team - not everyone at the same time on Race To Mars of course. Currently working on the game are programmers with many years of experience with AAA productions. We have new artists available and we are still moving forward. I hope this will finally be visible in the Apollo Update. The game has never looked so good before, and I am sure you, too, will be amazed by the new GUI.
Second, the success on EA gave us contacts and chances that we never hade before. Thanks to that we are working on things that will definitely be to your liking whenever we can finally unveil them. With that however I assure you that we will not stop working until RTM is the best damn game we are capable of giving to you. This is our "founding project", which gave us everything that INTERMARUM is today - a group of great people, who love ambitious products. Even today we are working so that Race To Mars can be bought boxed, with many different language versions, in an attractive release for lovers of strategy-economic games.
Third, we know we failed in many aspects. We also have a few ideas on how to repay you for that and are analyzing which of them will be technically possible. We will definitely give our all to thank each and every one of our current fans, hoping you will give us a little more time to make RTM what we have always wanted to be.
I, like the whole team, hope that you understand what problems the project is facing, but also what opportunities await. I also hope that you are with us and I know that these words should have been said a lot earlier. I am sure that together we can make Race To Mars better than we could have ever before.
Szymon Janus
CEO, INTERMARUM