Dear players and community members,
Today’s announcement is not about new features or bug fixes. It’s more about giving you a deeper insight in our operations. While we can’t share any company secrets, we’d like to share some “behind the scenes” insights with you. We would appreciate you taking the time to read the full article.
To further strengthen the trust with you, the community, we decided to share with you in a transparent way who we are, what Escape the Pacific (EtP) is, what issues we are facing at the moment and a sneak peak about the plans we have for the future of this game.
Who are we?
Even though we are a rather small team spread across the globe, we are dedicated to making EtP the most immersive survival game out there.
Please allow us to introduce ourselves. This is the core team:
- Peter is the core developer of EtP and the CEO of G4GT. He came up with the idea of Escape the Pacific back in 2016 when it was called Lost in Pacific. Peter has 32 years of coding experience covering 5 major languages, works for one of the largest anti-virus companies, is married and father of 2 kids.
- Chris is part of the team since many many years, working hands-on on every single part of EtP
- Radu joined the team in 2021 and took the game design role for EtP. When he’s not working on EtP, he’s busy managing electrical engineering projects for a multinational pharmaceutical business. He has experience in running start-ups, managing global teams, video production, web design and graphic design. Radu is working on improving the graphical assets including the UI of EtP and re-writing the content for the Steam page including re-designing its structure.
- Aleksandar, also known as FatFly, was always part of the team but it never got to be announced officially, until today. He contributes since years with his expertise related to real life survival, building mechanics and being self sufficient. He is what we call a true survivalist. If there would be one thing that we appreciate most about him, it is the fact that he has this hidden skill of intervening at the right time to provide suggestions, ideas and facts to keep us with the feet on the ground. He basically makes sure we don’t stray from the core concept of the game and reminds us that EtP is not a mainstream game that has to get boring after 10 hours of playing it. FatFly is also in charge of game balancing.
Around the core team, there are a couple of community members that help us improve EtP. These are (in no particular order):
- !Lady Southwark is providing relevant feedback from a user experience point of view. She is an Experience Design Researcher specialising in Usability Engineering. Things that are clear for us, the core team, might not always be clear for the player and sometimes aspects of the game can even be confusing to some. !Lady Southwark is super keen on accessibility and is a blessing for identifying such situations and providing ideas for solutions to these problems
- Karen M. aka Luna always showed massive interest in testing and improving EtP from a quality assurance perspective. By continuously testing the game, Luna helps us identify, understand and rectify things that we sometimes oversee. In fact, she is so dedicated that she is now the main point of contact for QA related subjects. Luna is experienced with building informative and well structured wiki pages, which is the reason why she was tasked with the update of the wiki page.
- Derek O. aka Sarge will be surprised to see his name mentioned here and we hope it’s a positive surprise for him. We thought it is important to show how much we appreciate community members that make our life easier. We, the core team, are being bombarded every day with messages on Discord. We love to talk to you and discuss not only EtP related matters, however, sometimes we have to switch off and focus on developing the game. That’s exactly where Sarge comes in. He is always willing to help new members find their way around the game and make sure they feel very welcome in the community. Sarge is also contributing to fixing bugs by providing relevant and detailed bug reports.
- Long term translators. If you play the game in any other language than English, you should know that this is made possible by the following game translators, whom we thank for their help and highly appreciate their contributions (in no specific order): Chris - German, Antonio aka Tonique - Spanish, Alexandr aka photon74 - Russian, Nicogalax - French.
- Streamers. We do not take it for granted when players invest time and resources into streaming on Twitch and publishing EtP related content on YouTube. This means the world to us and we can’t thank every single one of you enough for your support! To mention a few: Atheenon, Glen Bixley TV, Father-Jack, Suspeita, Hectic Nasari, Kage848, GameEdged, PvBoK, KeiT, Survive Games, Man Meets Gamez, Mykillangelo, BeatriX, Big Poppa T-Mo, Butch Cassidy, VantoroGaming, Axxel NRG, Jo_Rell, C.R. Ash & Friends and many more! If you don’t see your name here, don’t worry, we’re still watching you :)
What exactly is EtP?
Escape the Pacific is not an easy to play game. Having no instant gratification mechanics, EtP is not for everyone and we are OK with that. We can’t make everyone happy and that’s why we focus on keeping those happy that have accepted EtP for what it is: A true survival game that teaches you real life skills like building and reading a Sun Dial, using a compass and making your own map from scratch by means of triangulation methods and so on. The community around EtP reminds us every day how grateful they are for having the possibility to play such a realistic game. Please don’t take our word for it, instead, come and join us on Discord to experience yourself what we have built together. Anyone can join and be part of it.
Some of our core mechanics are amongst the most advanced ones when it comes down to actions and techniques related to real survival scenarios. If you ever sailed in EtP you know exactly what we mean.
We’d like to emphasise some of the features that arose from your ideas and suggestions i.e. Napping, Big Forest Island, Composter & Soil, Island Type selection screen, Smoker, Black Mangrove etc. As we mentioned in our Early Access statement on Steam, we are making this game based on the motto “Gamers for gamers”, hence our team name Gamers 4 Gamers Team, G4GT in short.
What brought us here?
Looking back to 2016 when EtP started emerging, we identified a couple of facts which impacted our overall development progress. We believe it is important for you to know these, to better understand what brought us here. In short:
- The idea of EtP was born in 2016, through Peter
- The team was put together by Peter and had a total of 6 members
- Alpha version 1 was released in 2018 as early access, to allow interested players to be part of the development process of the game
- Once EtP became popular, fans of another similar game started being hostile towards us (this is not a complaint, it is simply a fact)
- Said fans started threatening us online with lawyers and court cases
- Haters started mobbing and trolling us online
- 5 out of 6 team members left the team within the first months of development
- As the main person behind EtP, Peter kept going on his own
- Recognising the potential of EtP, new team members started joining G4GT
- The rest is history
Our past is what made us stronger. We are resilient to stress and are serious about delivering a finished game. Coding means being creative and creativity is prone to failures. In our case these failures are game-breaking bugs. To solidify our dedication and motivation, we’d like you to know that except Peter, all other team members are working on EtP on a voluntary basis. Why? Because we are 100% Bootstrapped with no outside funding and because we are a team of gamers making a game for gamers!
Good things take time and we believe that this is only possible with the help of the community. Without you, Escape the Pacific would probably not exist. That’s a fact and that’s also one of the many reasons why we are very active on Discord to talk to you about suggestions and new ideas. We recently started running polls for ideas that are being suggested by many players, to give you the opportunity to vote on it and let us know if implementing said features would make sense for you. If you’re not on our Discord yet, please join us to increase the chance of seeing features implemented that you want!
Current state of progress
With this announcement we’d wish to clarify the current state of the game and what our plan is to rectify problems. To be more specific, the game breaking bug that sometimes makes stuff disappear and other annoying issues. We received tons of feedback and bug reports from you about this and we have a strange feeling that you think we are not doing enough to fix it. It was also brought to our attention that the community is suffering because of this and we are genuinely sorry to hear that. The last thing we want is to upset players. This major bug was once solved and it looks like the root cause lies deeper than we thought.
What will the future bring us?
Now that we shared with you who we are and why we are voluntarily sleeping less, please allow us to conclude the announcement with what’s next in stores for the development of EtP. Moving forward, we decided to focus our resources more on fixing game breaking bugs first.
This might not be the answer you expected from us, however, we see it as a necessity to ensure the long term success of the development of EtP. We have big plans for the future and for those plans to be implemented successfully, we have to strengthen the foundation on which EtP is built upon. This foundation consists of approximately 250k lines of code to date and it has to be strong enough to sustain new features like i.e. Multiplayer, VR, 3rd person, NPCs, story mode and even educational content. You see where we’re going with this? We wish parents to be proud of their kids playing EtP and learning from it.
Moving forward you can expect:
- We will focus our resources more on fixing bugs quicker, with the majority of the resources focused on fixing game breaking bugs, as soon as they become known
- We will continue releasing regular updates as usual, however, they might contain less new features than you are used to up to this point
- To compensate for the above, we will focus more on polls to find out which new features you would like to have implemented first
We are here to stay and deliver a finished game that you can be proud of playing with your friends and family.
If you feel we forgot to thank anyone else, please let us know.
Thanks for your time reading this,
G4GT