From The Depths has Left Early Access!!

Hi everyone.
Nick here, the lead developer of From the Depths. I am writing this on the day of FTD’s exit from early access. This is a special moment for me (made only slightly less special by working 20-hour days and being slightly deranged with exhaustion).

FTD has been in development for 8 years. It started out as (to cut a long story short) a one man indie dev project but to call it that now is entirely inappropriate given the monumental amount of work put into the game by the team, community contributors and the community themselves.

I’d like to give special thanks to my team. Jeff Madole (Majyst) who has been looking after the game’s planet/faction content for years now, which is a monumental job made even harder by the frequent rebalancing of the game and introduction of numerous new mechanics.

Draba (János Blaskó) whose dedication to getting the game mechanics balanced and streamlined has been indefatigable even in the face of the frequent pushback that changes inevitably create. Without these two the game would be nowhere near as enjoyable and polished as it is today.

Many thanks also to Joris Wingelaar (HerpeDerpeDerp) who has spent the last year at the coal face of strategic AI (and many other things) and produced a campaign that is significantly more interesting to play.
Huge thanks to Arnaud Lewden (Gladyon) who has been coding on FTD for many years now and contributed an enormous amount to so many different areas.

Thanks to Haoyu Weng (WengH) for putting in the undo-redo mechanic for building, amongst many other epic things.

Further thanks to my business manager Sean Darling (Beastman) and community manager Jonathan Bacon (BaconsTV) who have allowed me to focus on what I love to do best, which is coding. You both work tirelessly to bring the community feedback to the team (whatever the timezone). It’s fantastic to know I can rely on you guys to keep things going smoothly.

Thanks to Peter ♥♥♥♥♥ (Khaz) for creating the visual aesthetic of the game and doing a bunch of coding as well. Peter worked for years alongside Jeff and me and together we brought the game a long way forward.

Thanks to Mattia Pizzaia (Mangmod) for all his work on the trailer, UI buttons, sounds, artwork and many other things.

Thanks to Rhea for your modelling contributions, and Joan Palacios (Strivvy) for yours, and thanks to the more recent members of the art team as well such as Mira Dzhantova for the new box art branding and trading cards and Claire Monoghan (Claire) for new block models and textures.

Thanks to Ben Reeve (BlueNexus) for his work getting the game localised ready for translation. This was a monumental job.

Thanks to Charlotte Nguyen (Hikari), Scarlet Devil and Karim Ben Ghorbal (Karbengo) for your significant contributions to the game’s content and community management.

Thanks to Mike Haynes (ABYAY) for coming to Scotland and working on the content, the tutorials, the build guides and much more.

Thanks to Lukaz Guzman for Rambot character art and loads of the original models and textures.

Thanks to the dozens of translators working on getting our translations of the game ready.

Thanks to Tor Johan (OwO) for testing.

Thanks to everyone I’ve forgotten (I’m sure I’ll remember once I get some sleep).

Thanks to our moderators, wiki editors, bug reporters, feature suggesters, donators and players. Special thanks to our dozens (hundreds?) of “Keepers of the Lore (KOTL)” for helping our content team create the blueprints of the factions Neter, AOTE and Glao. And thanks to all the youtubers and streamers who have adopted FTD and stuck with it. Without you the game would not have reached the audience it and development would have run out of funding a long time ago. Thanks to my wife, Laura, for putting up with this ♥♥♥♥.

So with the important part done I’d like to talk about what FTD means to me. It’s become my life now. When I started the project, I had hardly any coding experience, no 3D modelling or texturing experience, no unity experience, no UI experience (shocking, right?) and had never run a business. With the support of you all I’ve been able to make game development my life and am now recognised officially, in many player reviews as “one of the worst UI coders in the world". It has been a really great experience working with such talented people and making a product so many people are passionate about. I know FTD is very special to a lot of you as well and seeing you all enjoying it so much has been the driving force for me for this whole time.

So what does leaving early access mean for us. I know a lot of you are celebrating this achievement with us, but I know a lot of you are worried for one reason or another. Don’t be. Leaving early access just means that I think that we’ve got a sufficient breadth of features that are now in a stable state. This means I am proud to put it on general sale, rather than a limited sale to enthusiastic early accessors. This absolutely isn’t the end of development for us, it just means that our existing engines, weapons, armour, game modes, etc are now pretty much in place and won’t be changing every month.

So for people coming back to FTD to see what the release version looks like… here are some highlights for you… depending on how long you’ve been gone there will be too many to mention...
Universal Production Music UK have provided us with an epic sound track of 90 songs that you can listen to in game.
You can now add camouflage textures to your alloy, metal, heavy armour and wing materials
You can get back into the game more easily with voice acted build guides and interactive tutorials, and new manual pages
You’ll find a new and improved steam engine system to play with. That’s fresh out today….
The campaign’s 8 enemy nations have improved strategic AI making the campaign more interesting to play
The story mission arcs have been recreated and contain an interesting story for DWG, and some fun combat for Steel Striders
The multiplayer is now much more stable, and you can play adventure mode multiplayer now (as well as campaign co-op and many standalone multiplayer maps)
Achievements and leaderboards have been added
Visuals for jets, ion thrusters, torpedos and missiles have been refined.

To those of you coming to FTD for the first time, I really look forward to meeting you on the Steam discussion forums, the Reddit or the official FTD Discord.
I hope you all enjoy the release, and thanks again for all your support over the years.
Nick Smart,
Lead developer and Director
Brilliant Skies

And here's a wonderful video Jon put together for the release

https://youtu.be/QLfN7F91O6o