A WORD FROM THE DEVS

Game situation

[docs.google.com]

The next steps

And in the meantime

Hello everyone,Most of you know me, but for the new community members, I'm, producer & community manager in charge of Arena: Cyber Evolution at Spearhead Games.We have discussed during the past few weeks, all together, about ACE's future: what we want for the game and how to achieve it. Your feedback has been really positive and interesting.I'm presenting this vision here to make sure that everyone is aware of what is going on.After the tweaking and experimental process conducted in 2015, we went through a huge development process from November 2015 to May 2016. During these 6 months we have been able to conduct a wide Action Plan in order to upgrade the game's features and fix most of its mechanics.The game may not be perfect today, but it has never been better. Over the past two years we have been able to experiment and validate its core mechanics and propose a stable version of the game where everyone is able to enjoy the fun we wanted to share over this concept.We have completely refactored the UI, added more game modes, and improved most of the gameplay mechanics.We feel that we have something unique and interesting now and we believe in the viability of ACE as a great multiplayer game.But let's face the facts, we are a 15-person indie studio and our resources are not unlimited. We have done our best but a sports multiplayer game is a huge challenge, more than we ever thought. We know now that we won't be able to continue by ourselves and we need to move on with a different strategy and find a partner, now that we are able to present all the potential of this game.For sure, we could have continued to fix few things here and there, but what ACE really need is a long term development process and the related budget to reach its full potential. This is why we are now moving on a different path, and we are now looking for a private investor to build this strategy.We will gather everything which makes ACE unique and awesome, and build an investment pitch, strengthened by all the data we have from the events management we have conducted so far, to find a private investor for this project.This process will be conducted over the summer, and by the end of the year, we wish to secure a process and a budget to relaunch the game development.As most of you know, ACE has been developed on Unreal Engine 3, which was a great engine back in the time, but is now a bit out-dated, and we cannot continue to build a game with unsupported plugins. This is why this budget will aim to migrate ACE on Unreal Engine 4 as well.Developing Stories: The Path of Destinies allowed us to sharpen our skills on this game engine and we are excited to update ACE with everything UE4 has to offer.From there, after the migration, the game will be much more stable and much easier to maintain, allowing us to forecast the release of runners and customization assets on a proper calendar.The European Server will be upgraded in the next few days to a much more efficient hardware solution.We will continue to support theuntil the end of the current season (Oct 2016). All the in-game rewards and cash prizes are maintained.Make sure you are following us onto do not miss any of them.All the streaming sessions are maintained, but the Community Stream on Friday won't happen every week. Instead, it will become an announced event when we will have something to present to the community.Make sure you are following ACE onandto do not miss them.We'd like to thank everyone for their great support over all the game development process so far and we wish we will be able to come back to you with some great news as soon as possible.