Hi everyone, time for a special update.
After many questions from the community we thought it would be a good idea to tell you more about our development schedule. Let’s say we want to show you why we are so sure we will have EA this year.
At the end of last year, we scheduled for mid- 2019 with the intention of publishing on the start date of operation Barbarossa (june 22nd). We now know that 2 things will take us past that date; these are the engine update and content building.
The engine
The new engine itself is quite advanced. Best Way have put in a tremendous effort, working out some great new features and as a result it is a big step up from everything that came before it. It’s the engine of the future.
For Barbed wire studios this means a lot of labour intensive coding work, to make sure we get all the translations right. This “porting” process is time consuming and requires specific skills, and so this depends on just a few guys that can do the job.
Development
As a result of upgrading the engine, we need to re- test and review almost everything we have created so far, while at the same time we are still building more maps and missions, creating new 3d models and textures, etc.
The reason why we had no in- game footage so far is that the UI was/ is not yet ready; it would have been misleading to show you footage with a placeholder UI.
Testing
As soon as we can finish porting to a final engine version, testing can start immediately. We have everything in place and we are ready for the beta. Almost all of our testers are still on board; we are thankful for that. Meanwhile, if you agreed with us to be on the reserve list, keep an eye on your e-mail inbox.
Testing will obviously not be done in a week; with already over 20 hours of gameplay to test we are in for another massive job.
Early Access
The package you will get is nothing other than the beta version with most bugs ironed out. In that sense, we are almost done developing the EA package when the beta starts. Obviously, bugs need to be eliminated but that is usually much quicker than building the game. To make a long story short; we expect to announce EA quite shortly after the beta test.
When will this happen?
The engine update will be done in 2 steps in our case. First we will finish singleplayer content on our current (WiP version) engine, then we will do the same for multiplayer when we have the complete & final engine.
We expect this to happen during the summer, after which we test the beta & prepare release of EA. It’s hard to predict when exactly this will be, but it is clear it will be this year.
"A lot of indie developers who became 'Overnight Successes' were working at it for ten years." - Dan Adelman
Well, that’s it for now. We hope you can see that we are right to be optimistic and we look forward to release this year.
We want to thank you, the community, for sticking with us! Your support is much, much appreciated and that is very important for an indie studio like us. We love how you react to screenshots and updates, so we will keep producing more of those. In fact, let’s not just talk, let’s give you a set of screenies right now:
Did you know?
- Our indie team consists of 15 parttime devs from 9 countries
- The development budget available is $ 0,00
- The counter for unpaid man-hours for this game now stands close to 26.000
- The first GoH development updates appeared in august of 2015