Alpha When?

Ok ok ok, let’s talk about the elephant in the room first. As the years have gone by there have been important systems within the game that have needed an overhaul, but due to the size of our team, we were unable to resolve at the time. This is what’s known as technical debt, and like most fledgling studios, we vastly underestimated how early decisions would affect the project as time passed. Only within the last year were we able to double the size of our programming team and begin refactoring core systems. More work has been done on the game in the past year than the three years before it, combined.

Once PAX East ended, we immediately dumped our old network library and replaced it with a new one. To put this task into perspective: this is like ripping out your spine and replacing it with a new one. It should just work, right? We didn’t want to be months into Alpha and have to shut it down because, “Oh hey, our netcode has a glaring vulnerability in it! Pardon us while we turn the game off for two months to fix this issue, thanks for not freaking out at us!” We all know that wouldn’t go over well.

After the dust settles and a majority of the networking bugs have been squashed, we’ll be upgrading to Unity 2018. We expect that process to go relatively smoothly, but are prepared for a few road bumps. There are other major tasks looming on the horizon as well, such as reworking player inventory, game-state manager, gun architecture, and scaling our back-end up to support matchmaking during Alpha and beyond. We’re taking this time to future-proof our systems to make testing as smooth as possible. We would much rather spend Alpha tuning gun balance or adjusting level generation based on player feedback instead of implementing a hack fix to quickly slap a bandaid on defunct systems.

We appreciate everyone’s patience as we continue to work towards release. We’re crushing bugs as quickly as we can because trust me when I say we’re trying to avoid shipping with stuff like this: