Hi everyone!
It’s one month since Derail Valley was released. As such we felt the timing is right to have a quick recap of what was done on the game so far, and what our plans are for the future.
We’ve released 13 updates since launch, which is one update per 2.5 days! Here are the major improvements we’ve made so far:
Most of critical launch problems have been resolved by now, leaving a handful of urgent issues we’re working on right now, such as full savegame and item storage.
Over time we’ve been scouting all your bug reports and feedback. Each and every report gets added to our internal issue tracker, which is restructured daily in order to optimize the bug fixing process as much as possible. Current state:
Launch results:
Some of you know that we’ve been funded by Serbian Innovation Fund for the past year. The funding, which was a tremendous help to the project, ended in January and we are now solely dependent on the game’s revenue to continue.
That said, the sales have been going great so far, exceeding our launch expectations!
We've returned our investment, and gained solid development time ahead of us. Considering that we haven’t spent a dime on marketing to date (funding restrictions), this is a great result and we’d like to say massive thanks to all of you for continually helping us spread the word about Derail Valley!
Growing the team:
The five of us are working as much as we can, and we obviously can't keep up with all that needs to be done. We decided to take things a step further and invest to grow Derail Valley faster and reach more people:
- Ivan, our long time closed beta tester will soon start coordinating community events and making video updates, briefly showcasing every new build.
- Starting today, we are on a lookout for an experienced game developer (programmer) to join our team, preferably in Belgrade, Serbia.
- We are also on a lookout for a junior assistant with exceptional communication skills and passion for games, in Belgrade.
Plans for the future:
First of all, make sure you are aware of our public roadmap. We’re updating it regularly!
Now, if you ever wondered what we’d like to do after that - we’ve heavily updated our community unlocks page to reflect our vision for the possible next couple of years.
Given the launch allowed us to expand the team, we’ve slightly adjusted the “economy” of community unlocks in your favor, reducing requirements for the diesel locomotive down to 25K. Already at 30k, we will start working on initial version of mod support for locomotives, that so many of you were asking for! Many more goals were added too, such as co-op multiplayer:
New Community Unlocks.
To make these goals possible in the future we would need to expand our team once again. In no way can we guarantee that we will ever reach these goals (hence they are community goals), but with your help we might as well give it a go. There’s still a LOT of people unaware of Derail Valley.
When we launched the community unlocks campaign, just two months ago, we were at 4.3k points. We are now at 16.3k, so let’s see where this will lead us! Since then three goals were passed and we are working on the rewards. We expect to have Hazmat Jobs and Shunter Remote ready in a few weeks (ETAs have been adjusted accordingly)!
Price increase in the future:
It’s early to fully announce this, but we want to begin preparing all the potential buyers - as bugs get sorted out over time (i.e. once there are no more priority 1 issues), we will increase the price of Derail Valley. Of course, price increase will be announced in more detail when the time comes.
Thank you everyone and see you tomorrow with another game update!