Hello Survivors!
We are getting closer to the end of the year and would like to say Thank You! for being part of this exciting journey.
February 2023 will mark the 5th anniversary of Escape the Pacific and this year was full of surprises for all of us. We surprised you with a delayed update and you surprised us by still being supportive and understandful. Both of which helped us laying down the much needed foundations for the future. Whilst we had a couple of hick-ups, the community grew again this year and we are very happy to have you onboard. We couldn't wish for a more positive and supportive community!
Before we end the year, we would like to provide a recap of this year's achievements and what our next steps are. We are sorry that this year we couldn't deliver as per your expectations and we regret to have let you down. We are humans too and whilst we reduced the frequency of the updates, we're doing everything reasonably possible to increase the quality of same. Thanks for being patient with us.
2022 ACHIEVEMENTS
GAME
Game-wise we had 3 releases this year:
- Fast Sail, Napping, Black Mangrove, Optimizations, reworked Attach/Detach system for Rudders, Sail Masts and Sails
- New Island (Hill Island), Skill degradation, Item Holders (Small Sticks, Planks, Coconuts, Fire Sticks)
- Game Menu UI/UX Redesign, Redesigned Time-Flow system, New Island (Mangrove island), New Waves mechanics
We also
- Fixed 139 issues
- Reworked and optimized parts of the internal game engine
- Amended the codebase with new functionalities to accommodate future features
COMMUNITY
- As of today we are 479 Survivors on Discord! Which is a plus of 195 members, compared to last year! For us, this means the world!
- We are more active on the Steam forum and reply on a daily basis to questions
- We have updated our Steam page to reflect the current development progress
- We have translated the Steam page to Spanish, Russian, French, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil) and Simplified Chinese
- We have upgraded our website. In case you missed it: https://escapethepacific.com/
- We have upgraded the wiki page. In case you missed it: https://etp.fandom.com/
TEAM
A lot has happened in this area. The main question asked by you was "Where's Chris?". Without sharing any sensitive details, we can only answer with "He left the team". Some of the very dedicated community members made it into the team this year. Luna joined the newly formed QA department and FatFly took the role of Player Assistance within the team.
FUTURE PLANS
- IN GAME UI The next big visual improvement is to update the in-game UI. We will roll it out in phases over the course of 2023. We also aim to improve the overall user experience and implement a modular Heads Up Display (HUD), where you can choose in the settings how much information you wish to see on the screen.
- TUTORIAL Your feedback got us motivated to rethink the tutorial part of Escape the Pacific. We are actively working on this and hope to release an improved tutorial mid 2023.
- ROADMAP Especially this year, we felt that our progress was all over the place, with no clear structure communicated to the community. And, since many of you asked for a roadmap, we're planning on implementing one. Starting 2023 we will be looking into creating a public roadmap for the community, where you will be able to see our high level plans for Escape the Pacific.
- UPDATES
Going forward, we're hoping to be able to implement more thematic updates. Let's say we decide to add Bamboo to the game. This means that the update will include a complete "Bamboo World":
- Bamboo tools
- Bamboo flora
- Bamboo building modules
- Other Bamboo related items
Features that are part of the same update will be based on the same theme i.e. Bamboo, Iron, Gardening, Hunting etc.
Additionally, we also intend to keep adding smaller features outside of a particular theme.
ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS
Some of you have called us money grabbers and many other names that we can't mention in this article. We respect everyone's opinion and even though we can't make you understand who we are and why we are doing this, we'd like to share with you three private and personal points:
- Keeping the development up and running is actually costing us money, which automatically means that we are investing private equity into keeping the game on Steam. We are a rather small team, however, we are passionate about building a game that you (and ourselves) love playing. This is one of the biggest reasons why we go to certain lengths and keep it up.
- Insulting us (or the game) is taxing on our mental health and we kindly ask you to be mindful in case you're planning on leaving a review. Even better, come talk to us on Discord. We're there every day. Please use this invitation link https://discord.gg/YBa4WtSkkS
- While other dev teams abandon their games or even worse, do a money-grab, we're still here delivering updates to the community. Because we care.
Before wishing you happy holidays, we still have one thing to mention and because we are not sure how to formulate it politically correct to not insult anyone, we'd like to direct you to Hashtag Survival's website to read their Escape the Pacific Review. Please read the "Review & Thoughts" tab, especially the section mentioning "... the level of bluntness the team sometimes employs..."
FUN FACT
Escape the Pacific is one of the most realistic hardcore survival games out there. We intend to keep it like that. Besides this, we will definitely make it more attractive to the casual Survivor by adding a creative mode and player roles i.e. Builder, Explorer etc.
The entire G4GT wish you great festive days and we're excited to talk to you next year!
Peter - Dev & CEO
Luna - QA
FatFly - Player Assistance
Radu - UI, UX & Project Lead