Ahoy space adventurers! It’s time again to start up our current development status reports for 2017 - I hope the new year has been great to you so far!
With the start of the new year for Osiris, I had some time to reflect how far our indie development team has come since our debut at PAX West 2016 - at that time, it was still Manny (lead programmer) and myself crossing our fingers that we had it right when we made Osiris. Now, just a few months later, we’re a core team of fourteen with an amazing dedicated fanbase that keeps growing with each major update. I often have to shake my head and smile when thinking about how far we’ve come but also, how far we have yet to go!
So, you’re all wondering what might be coming through in the next months? One of the major things we’re doing is moving to the newest version of the Unity engine - the guys at Unity have been really great with their support and we believe moving to the newest version will greatly improve visual performance… it also might enable us to do some cool new graphical effects as well.
Now as we continue to make the game bigger and better, our player base also grows - and that’s great - but it does come with some problems. And the one problem that we’ve been monitoring lately is cheating and hacking. We know the majority of players want a fun AND fair experience when playing Osiris: New Dawn… so to those cheating and hacking, please knock it off!
Of course, the reality is that the cheaters and hackers won’t stop and we’re working on anti-cheat measures to be implemented soon. As much as I wish we could get our anti-cheat features applied immediately, that’s just not possible for our small dev team: without going into too much detail, I work with our programmers to do a comprehensive review of each line of code to see where there might be variables that can be altered, we decide how we want to edit these points in the code, test our edits to make sure they don’t affect other lines of code, recompile the entire codebase to check for any breaks or errors, prep our test and production teams to further test the revised code, make any additional alterations, then update the public code with these changes.
For our team, this can be a 2-3 week process which majorly impacts us in two ways (1) it takes time from fixing current bugs in the game and (2) it prevents us from spending that time to design any new features we want to add in the next coming updates. And don’t get me wrong - we definitely need to do this, but it’s a real bummer how a couple of cheaters and hackers actually impacts game development planning. For the time being, our upcoming hot patch will include a malicious/cheating player reporting feature that is basically a “band-aid” until we can properly deliver robust anti-cheat options in the future.
I also want to make sure we set expectations right for this hot patch; based on our past updates and hotfixes, this will be a relatively minor one, with the most visible new feature being third-person shovel animations. There’s a reason for this, and you will all see this in March as we’re going to have a major update planned right around PAX East! In many ways this will be our biggest update yet and is purely driven by the feedback from our amazing community on how we can expand and improve Osiris to become the best possible game it can be. There’s too much coolness to list here and I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise, so for starters let’s just say there’s something big brewing in the deep AND we’ll finally start learning what happened to the Osiris 1 settlers.
In addition to a giant update we’ve been hard at work on a brand new, completely free, companion app for Osiris: New Dawn! This app will be available for Android and iOS and will feature the ability to monitor your characters, base, vehicles, basically everything you have in the game. Plus it will be an easy way to connect to your colony, plan gameplay sessions, and eventually even ask for reinforcements if you’re under attack. We plan on making the app available in March and will be developing it much like the game, by adding new features based on community feedback.
I don’t know how many of you reading this will be at the upcoming Game Developers Conference that’s happening in San Francisco in next week, but I’ll be there briefly to showcase Osiris: New Dawn at the Unity booth as well as meeting up with people in the industry and maybe looking at some new technology or games. While these huge industry events are always fun - it’s almost like an annual high school reunion for nerds - nowadays it’s hard for me to justify spending more than just a couple of days… especially with the major update just on the horizon!
Captain’s Log - Earth, February 21, 2017
Mcrae - out