Today, after many months of work, we finally present to you the Apollo Update. We know that we tried your patience very hard and understand how some of you are very angry at us. We would like to present how we feel about the last few months and hope you will find time to read it. I allow myself these thoughts because we definitely see the finish line of what we want to achieve in Race To Mars 1.0. I speak about the 1.0 version, because we want to update for a few months after the premiere, adding new elements we invented during development, but were unable to fit due to time constraints. The main problem with developing Race To Mars was, as is often the case, it's success. Very good Early Access sales directed us on a path a little too difficult for a team with our experience - we decided to create a bigger, better game with better visuals, a new GUI (which you can see in this build). That unfortunately led to situations where we were forced to create a lot of things from scratch, only realizing that this form of work makes it very difficult to regularly update the game as part of Early Access - too much was happening in the code and not enough in working mechanics to have it reasonably updated. It can be seen in many EA projects. The other reason for the delays were huge changes in the team - two of the programmers who were working on Race To Mars from the beginning decided to focus on personal development and started their PhDs in computer development in a different country. The new team, handling different projects at that time, needed some time to get to know the project and take over its development. It was not without personal problems too, when our main technical designer was struggling with a serious illness and couldn't focus as much on the project. He is now a few days after a kidney transplant and we are all hoping for his swift return to health. His design work is 90% done, so it shouldn't be a source of further delays. Of course, there were also errors in team leadership, which let us learn a lot and help deliver you an even better project. The third reason for the last delays were problems with Mission Control. It required us to reconsider a few project points and, due to other obligations, work on it had to be handled by a different programmer, who, unfortunately, was not able to finish yet. During that time we added a lot of different things, but we decided we really can't afford to wait anymore to finish this one building. We are, all of us, gamers on the team and we have always wanted to make games from our love to them, with faith that we'd treat our fans the way we would like to be treated ourselves. We understand we have failed many of you, but we will keep trying even harder to prove to you that it was worth the wait. We will also make sure to make amends also in other ways, but that will have to wait for another time. Now I invite you to try out the update and write your opinions. The next update should be available in the upcoming weeks and contain things like Mission Control and the Astronaut Complex, with bugfixes and minor improvements included. --- FULL FEATURUES - Administration - Research+Development - Assembly Building - University - Inbox - Time Line Bar - Save / Load - National Space and Air Office (old gui) - End Turn Raport WORK IN PROGRESS - PRIORITIES - Mission Control - Astronaut Complex - Launch Facilities - National Space and Air Office TO DO - Museum - Programs - Tracking Station - Tutorial