Hello everyone,
We’ve noticed that not everyone keeps up with our social media feed, and as such we often receive questions such as “When is the next update releasing?” or “Are you guys still working on the game?”. As the year comfortably rolls into its eighth month, we figured it might be time to talk a bit about where we’re at now with regards to releasing the next update.
First and foremost, this post will not contain a release date or indication of any sort. We’re still at a point where setting a concrete date is mere speculation.
As many in the community have noticed, the wait for this next update has been pretty long and on top of that we haven’t yet been able to really disclose a lot of information about the upcoming update. Each Saturday, we do post smaller updates of enhancements coming in the next update on our social media feed but we understand that these might be too small of a scale for the liking of certain people.
The reason why this next update is taking longer is threefold, we felt now might be a good time to go a bit more in depth on those reasons;
This passion project has been going on for a long time. This is only made possible by our talented and dedicated team of artists, coders, musicians, sound technicians and more who work on this project in their free time. As the years go on, the amount of free time has decreased in favor of other responsibilities such as starting families, progressing our careers and other such things.
Secondly, it was really important for us to find and establish a better SSF2/other stuff balance. As members who’ve been part of the community for a longer time may recall we have previously tried out a schedule where we did smaller scale updates every 2 months. The end results was that this led to long-term burnout behind the scenes. We’ve talked a lot about establishing a better balance in this development cycle and I can confidently say that currently the team at least feels a lot better and less stressed out now that we aren’t constantly worried out about a tight schedule.
Last but not least is perhaps the most interesting to talk about (although we can’t go too deep into its specifics) is more behind-the-scenes restructuring of our workflow on the coding side of development. What this means in concrete terms, is that the long-time members of the coding team are now better able to work on specific parts on the engine to optimize, enhance and create content where they couldn’t before. Setting this up took quite a lot of time, learning and effort, but will make things much, much smoother in the future. This area is also where the current roadblocks to release lie.
Previously, we sometimes had the luxury of splitting up and holding back certain content if it meant we could put out a release faster. Due to all the aforementioned, that isn’t an option available to us this time. As such, we’ve taken to clearing up all the engine roadblocks before we start pinpointing a release this time (anything other than that is not worth releasing, we think). Now that the coders are slowly able to take on engine-related tasks, the work will hopefully go much more smoothly and quickly.
When the time comes where we’re able to go into more details, we’ll take every opportunity available to do so. Previously we mentioned that our aim is release the update in 2023, that is still the goal we’re trying to work towards.
For those not keeping up with the aforementioned social media feeds that still want a taste of how development is going, check some of the new things in motion in our progress report:
Lastly, I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank each and every member of our community for continuing to support this game still, either by making videos, hosting and entering tournaments, spreading the word or simply talking about it (be it on our discord or otherwise). We’re very grateful to have everyone cheering us on still- we couldn’t do it without all the support from the sidelines!
