Hola fellow survivors,

Today I’m happy to announce that our first DLC for State of Decay, ‘Breakdown’, has been delivered to Microsoft for pre-certification testing. This means the game is content-and-feature complete, and all that remains is to squash any remaining bugs and make final tweaks to tuning and balance.

So what happens from here?

First, our excellent QA team at Microsoft will spin up multiple teams on two continents for around-the-clock testing. Most of these guys were involved with State of Decay, so they are not only able to find bugs — which is always an essential task — but also help us understand where we are and are not hitting the mark for the survival experience we’re working hard to create. These guys are hard-working, passionate badasses, and we’re glad they’ve got our backs.

Through next week the QA teams will be playing Breakdown, logging any issues they find, and sending feedback to the development team. We’ll spend our (probably quite long) days reviewing, prioritizing, and squashing bugs, and incorporating the design feedback from the QA teams, members of our publishing team at Microsoft, and of course our own developers here at the Lab.

The plan is to have all that wrapped up and submit formally to certification testing at the end of next week. As we’ve said before, we like to be transparent about our plans, but things could change. Our test team could turn up some huge game-screwing design flaw next week. We might make a mistake in the packaging format and fail certification. The government shutdown could close down the internetz. Anything could happen.

But, assuming no catastrophes, we plan on getting Breakdown into your hands by the end of October.

If you want to know more about the design goals for Breakdown, make sure to read Lab designer Geoffrey Card’s post.

We’ll do our best to survive the rest of the month; then it’s your turn. 😉