It’s been a few months since my last studio update, and many things have happened!

Studio News

For about a year, I’ve been talking with a senior game engineer, wooing him to join our crazy team. He has plenty of experience and we’re narrowing in on a possible start date. If we go forward, this will help a lot in getting this game out the door.
As our focus starts to turn from tech to content, I’m in discussions with a lead writer for dialogue and lore.
We will be ramping up our presence, to this end we are partnering with a small fresh streamer to see how this goes. More streamers to follow.
We’re looking for a new senior/lead artist.
I’ve recently closed a deal to sell one of my companies. It has been for sale for over a year so it was a bit surprising a deal came together so suddenly. This buys us some more time on the game.

Next Build: End of Oct

As I previous wrote, Build 14 is the last major build before we release to early access. The last two major components to complete for build 14 to be playable are:

Quest Systems
NPCs feeling alive and interactive

Unfortunately we’ve been stalled on the Quest Systems for about 8 weeks. It’s chewing us up and spitting out our bones! As of this writing, I don’t even know how much effort it will take to get it working. I think end of Oct is still reasonable, we’ll see.

(This is why you don’t announce dates until all your tech is in place… [face palm])

Early Access: Mid - Late April 2023

Valve/Steam recently announced moving a sale to mid March 2023… making it ridiculous to try and launch a game then. How dare they! We have to delay our launch about 4 weeks to mid April.

Our Early Access plan has changed based on research into Hades Early Access experience. We will make monthly updates for probably a year. I’m still mapping this out, but this looks more realistic.