Hi everyone,
It’s been a long couple of months, and finally we’re here with some notable news - both good and less so. To get the bad stuff out of the way - sadly we won’t be ready for a September release. There are many factors behind that outcome, some of which I’ve explained further below. Still, knowing you guys are eager to try the new content, we’ll soon start with closed beta signups, to begin rolling out at the end of month!
Large world - proof of concept:
Onto the progress - the huge news is that now we have a working proof of concept for large worlds. It was hands down one of the most critical milestones for Derail Valley, and probably the most complicated we’ve done so far too.
From the moment we’ve launched demo Update 5, bgr and I have been working day and night on this, among other urgent distractions. After a ton of research, testing, planning, development and practicing black magic, just a few days ago we’ve finally got the full new world tech running in VR. The system is not flawless and there’s a lot of things to improve still, but currently it runs fairly well on a GTX 970.
Judging by the screenshot alone it might not seem like much of a breakthrough, but there’s a few important things to note:
- The world can now be literally the size of a small country
- It works in VR
The large world system was built in such a way that the world’s size is virtually ineffective on performance. It also requires minimal human input in order to expand it with more content, however it is not completely procedural - we retain human control over gameplay-dependent aspects of it (i.e. where we want hills and valleys to be, and how high, as well as the distribution of biomes and vegetation on them).
With the technical and artistic foundation complete, it is now fairly simple to add more surface area. The world is currently at 16x16km2 (64 times the demo world), and we’re planning to at least double it later during Early Access.
Roughly painted map defines where we’d like mountains, hills and valleys to be. Our system then creates a detailed photorealistic world from it that runs in VR
Rather than tediously placing assets by hand and building fake “corridor” environments, we made this system to create a truly vast world with a living railway network. We want to invoke the feeling of the player taking a small part in this world, able to choose missions and routes seamlessly, without the limitations of pre-defined “scenarios”.
See that mountain in the background? You can actually get there by train!
Railway remains to be added as the final essential feature, which will also be a combination of human input and procedural generation. Currently the generator is able to create meadows, fields and forests, and during Early Access we’ll expand it with a lot more biome and vegetation diversity, including rocky cliffs, rivers, lakes, swamps, towns and other geographical features. Once we’re done with the essentials, we’ll make a dedicated devlog describing how our large world system works in a lot more detail.
Delay and release postponement:
While the large world milestone is great news, it took us longer to get here than we anticipated. Thus, we won’t be able to finish everything we planned for September Early Access release and have to postpone it once again. It’s entirely our fault for the repeated faulty release estimate, but nevertheless here’s some contributing factors that you guys should know:
Although we’ve been a three people team, only bgr and I worked on the majority of the game for quite a while now. Several times this has led us to miscalculate plans that depended on three people actively working on the project but had two instead. Our third team member does great work and remains involved with Derail Valley, but due to not being able to focus entirely on our project he opted out from being a vital member. As a 2.1 person sized team now we will essentially retain the same productivity rate, but just be better at estimating our progress.
Some delays came from the tools we use. The large world system relies on a few great third-party Unity plugins, some of which are still in development and some not even released yet. Their postponements, some of which measured in months, directly affected our own estimates. Still, developers of those plugins actively work on the plugins and some directly communicate with us in solving problems together, and without their heroic efforts a game with ambitious scope like ours would’ve been impossible for 2.1 persons to tackle. Good news is - we’ve got most of core dependencies under our control now.
Finally, one of the biggest delay contributors was a rather positive event - an opportunity to submit our project for consideration to a local technological innovation fund. Considering that it’d allow us to hire more developers and bring the game out of Early Access much quicker - independently from actual revenue success - we thought focusing on submitting Derail Valley there had higher priority than releasing the game on time.
Preparation for that submission (which had 1st of September as deadline) took us a whole month, and resulted in us creating a very detailed project plan which defines what the game will have when it’s finished, and what it will take to get there. We’ll turn that plan into a roadmap for you guys to see as well once we get the urgent stuff out of the way. Regardless of whether we’ll be awarded the grant or not (which we’ll find out in a few months), it’s another rather important milestone done. Wish us luck, as we believe the positive outcome of this submission would be very significant for the future of Derail Valley, but also for the future of VR and train simulations in general.
Closed beta instead of release:
We know you guys are eager to try out the new stuff, and considering we’ve already postponed the release date once, we felt it would be unfair to do the same thing again without some way to compensate for it.
Therefore, in late September we’ll start rolling out beta access to Derail Valley fans in whatever state the game is in at that moment. Beta will last as long as it takes us to finish the Early Access release version. We won’t give any estimates for the release date anymore, but you’ll be able to judge completeness based on beta and directly influence the release date with your feedback! We have the steam locomotive in development already, so you can expect to see that too in rough form.
Considering that the release version will still be in development at the time of beta rollout, those of you who’ll get into the beta first might experience FPS drops, hiccups, and things of that sort. We will aim to eliminate any critical problems before releasing the game on Early Access.
The only thing we will ask during the beta is not to post any reviews, comments, screenshots and videos of the beta content publicly, until the game is released - simply because it would be the best for the project if the highest fan and press attention is focused at the time of launch, rather than spread-out when the game is still not yet available for purchase. We will however have our internal beta Discord channel where you guys can discuss new features, share media with each other and give us feedback.
Very soon we’ll make another announcement with a link to a beta access request. Stay tuned!
That’s it for this update. We've also updated the store page descriptions to reflect better what the game will offer when it's released. In the meantime please spread the word as it’s always helpful to have new players trying the demo or new fans joining the community! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, let us know on our Steam forum or Discord!