Hello Gun$mithers, Rich here, hope you’re all well! Today we’re putting out some news on why we’ve been a bit quieter lately and news on the date of the next Gun$mith update. As many of you know our previous method of updating was to do small updates every four weeks and then a large update every eight weeks.
Over time as the game has grown we are starting to feel like Gunsmith is requiring larger and more complex updates that take longer than four weeks to make. So we are adjusting our update drops to be slightly longer in production but ultimately larger chunks of game improvements when they do come out.
Secondly, we want to change large parts of the game, since our launch we have improved as a team, become far more professional and far more advanced in our engineering and artistic respectives. As some of you may know, when we first launched the game we even had individual bullets that would crush everyone's computer. It looked great but also an amateuristic oversight on our part.
The one major flaw of Gunsmith is also that we needed to create it quickly and therefore a full game plan was being created on the fly. This is something we want to rectify before we leave Early Access.
The third major factor is, as a business we have desperately needed to get more titles under our belt to support the company and its growth. We expanded the team to work on Gunsmith and drop better and larger updates, however the game has not expanded as we expected in tandem with this goal. Therefore, we are trying to release more products to help with that balance. Some of you will know we released a game called Kinetic Edge, that didn’t do so well. This has left us with a major predicament. Therefore we had to make a move in a new direction.
So there’s good news and bad news, the good news is, we have made another game that we think people will love, including the Gun$mith fanbase. The bad news is, this has delayed the next major update for Gun$mith for some time.
We know the Gun$mith community is super supportive and you’ve been behind us now for 3 years. We need that same support for us as an indie company on the whole and not just on Gun$mith.
I can completely understand why this will be unfortunate news for many of you, but I can guarantee no matter what we will finish Gun$mith, get it out of Early Access and support it into its twilight years. But as a business, and as a business owner, I truly feel the way we can give that the best odds of success is if we have more games to support us so we can stop having to focus on finances all the time and focus on making a great game.
So what is our plan…
Well, this is where things look promising. We sat down as a team and we realised we needed to play to our strengths, take what we know we can do really well and make a new game.
That game is called JUNKPUNK. We took our factory management experience, reworked it, made it much better, more efficient and more fun to play. We designed a game plan from start to finish including its balance. We’ve gone over our existing systems and refined them to get much more from them. Junkpunk is a Survival factory RPG, where you have to restore a polluted planet and prepare it for habitable life. The Steam page is here and we would super appreciate your support.
Now why is this good for Gun$mith?
So, we plan to re-pull these reworked systems from JUNKPUNK, back into Gun$mith. Which means many things.
- The VAST majority of FPS issues will be gone and you will be able to make thousands of items without FPS loss.
- We have reworked our conveyor belt tech so you can simply click and drag to machines creating a much more dynamic and fun game.
- We have reworked how items travel on belts, allowing far more precision and most importantly, this will allow us to move into the next stage of Gun$miths development by building larger more complex objects such as missiles and vehicles etc.
- We have reworked how the manufacturing process works to make it more fun and less tedious by placing too many machines with too many ingredients.
- We have also reworked how mission systems work so we can start to integrate a proper missions system into Gunsmith.
There's even more benefits to all of this, but i'll stop there. So with that being said. JUNKPUNK will be releasing in November so watch out for it and hop in if you think you’ll enjoy it.
We expect the next major update for Gunsmith to come in December this year. So not too much longer of a wait. But this is our predicted timeline for now.
I hope you can understand our situation and we will come back soon with major improvements to Gun$mith and an awesome road into the future.
Best
Rich