As of right now it has been over 6 months since the last and only TeleBlast update and it is with great excitement that I announce that a new update is coming tomorrow, the 17th of May.
Firstly, I must apologise to the people that put their trust in me and bought the game in Early Access; I feel like I have let each one of you down by taking this long and I hope that I can restore your trust not only with this release but also the releases going forward.
What I am releasing is not going to be a perfect game, nothing close to it but it is going to be a step in the right direction and I have a plan going forward that aims for an eventual 1.0 release later this year.
While I won’t go into all the details of why it took me this long, I think it is important to recognise one of the reasons given it is a prominent topic around the game industry at the moment and that is crunch.
I am forever grateful for the opportunity to showcase TeleBlast to the many people that came and played it at PAX Australia last year, however the pressure I put on myself and the people around me to be there was immense. Game development is not my full time job so most of the work I do on TeleBlast is either on my commute or takes away from the time I spend with my friends and family. In the lead up to the event, I was at a point where I was working 80-100 hours a week which is something that is completely unsustainable for anyone.
At the time I didn’t think about what I was doing; I only focused the goal of producing something polished and exciting for players. Following PAX, I didn’t want anything to do with TeleBlast, I didn’t want to work on it, I couldn’t even look at it; I was completely burnt out. It remained this way for at least the next 4 months.
When I finally came back to working on TeleBlast I was in a position where, because of the crunch, I had used a lot of shortcuts in developing features which had caused a number of bugs. I knew that if I was to enjoy developing TeleBlast again, I had to do things right which meant a lot of refactoring.
I had originally planned on releasing the refactored version of TeleBlast to Steam however it would have been disappointing to wait 5 months for a release, only to get nothing new so I decided to hold it back an additional month and add features to get people excited about the game again.
What is going out tomorrow is what the game should have been in an initial Early Access release; I was probably a bit premature in releasing TeleBlast when I did but I wanted to capture the hype from people playing the game at PAX to being able to buy it as soon as they got home.
This time around, I am in a much better place with regards to adding more features to the game, fixing bugs as well as just mentally and physically. I can’t wait to share with you all what it is in store. I look forward to your feedback and I can’t wait to hear all about the experience of sharing TeleBlast with your friends.
I am in the process of putting together some release notes of what is different in TeleBlast so stay tuned for those but until next time, take care of yourselves and have fun!
Also, please join the TeleBlast community on Discord, I’d be more than happy to talk about the game or anything else on your mind!