Hey everyone, it’s time for your first weekly update of 2018! To recap 2017 started off with us launching our first Alpha backer weekend which was well received. After an initial burst of momentum, the frequency of released slowed dramatically as we proceeded to tackle the last high-risk items on our to-do list: re-engineering our networking, mitigating the ability of players to cheat, and improving performance through better threading on multi-core systems. This took a bit longer than we had anticipated which made the middle of the year a bit frustrating for the team as we couldn’t release any new patches with deconstructed networking. Fortunately, after we completed the networking overhaul, we were able to finish the year strong as our technology investments began to pay big dividends by allowing us to rapidly iterate in hours on gameplay systems that used to take days. We had our second Alpha backer weekend with the new networking code along with many additional improvements which was, once again, well received.

A closeup of the corvette

The final weeks of 2017 were spent fixing bugs from the Alpha weekend, working on capital ships, and implementing new weapons. Due to the holidays and, despite being spread around the world, half the dev team falling ill the second half of December and early January were quite slow. As of right now everybody is back feeling better and we’ve shifted our attention toward what we need to do for 2018. For starters we want to have another Alpha backer weekend to test out the new weapon code as soon as possible. This will follow the previously established release cadence where we first release the patch to Developer Access backers and, if everything goes smoothly, we will open the game up to Alpha backers for a long weekend within a week or two of the patch. It’s still slightly too early to provide a timeline for that patch but we hope to have more information shortly.

A carrier flying above Cinder

A carrier flying above Cinder

As we’ve mentioned before our goal is to release the Alpha version of the game in the first half of 2018. It’s going to be a much rougher release than we had initially planned but, due to the delays, we feel it’s better to get something “good enough” out as soon as possible. At a high level the remaining features are: getting all weapon categories mocked up for both small and capital ships, polishing capital ship controls, implementing the resource system, mocking up sensors, creating a basic main menu system, creating our first proper battlescape, adding win conditions, and improving warp. Due to the rough state of the initial Alpha release there will be a lot of work to get done for the Beta which we hope to release by the end of the year with a full release to retail sometime in the first half of 2019. It’s going to be a very busy year for us but we’re done with the major technical hurdles and it’s time to really bring Infinity: Battlescape to life.