It's been about 6 months since Death Road to Canada was released! Thank you to everyone for making the game a success for us. Players, Kickstarter backers, and the people that post feedback to testing branch comments and the discussions forum!
Coming up very soon is our big AORTA update, which adds more content, achievements AKA cheevos, new weapons, feature requests, and more. AORTA is getting out later than we thought it would, as we ended up diverging from our plans to get an update out every 2-4 months. In the last 6 months, we've done over 10 major updates! This does not include the many updates we've done on the Testing Branch. A summary of all the things we've added to the game since launch is at the end of this post. This rapid update schedule has also shuffled around work on the mobile versions and Kickstarter content. We're going to switch to iOS for a bit immediately after AORTA is done, which should be this week. AORTA update will also add in a lot of the missing Kickstarter stuff, like the above pictured Kitten and Puppy Modes.
As promised, we're going to continue doing major updates for another 6 months. We will be switching to a less grueling pace with updates, to go more with our original plans of an update every 2-4 months depending on its size. Here's what to expect, though things may change as needed:

• BRAINSTEM Update: Around the time of the iOS launch. Late February or so. New multiple-game progression system, where you find Trait Points and unlock new Perks and Traits with them. Trading cards and emotes! Some extra tweaks and requests from feedback.
• COCCYX Update: Around 4 months after BRAINSTEM, so likely in late June or into July. Splitscreen and co-op improvements! Big focus on new content! This will be us concentrating on adding more content to the game, rather than brand new systems. Road events, special characters, weird new weapons, new rare traders, all sorts of things.
• DEUODENUM Update: This goes beyond the next 6 month period! Likely our last big update, though we'll still do smaller updates after this. We will get player feedback on what should be in this one later. It will probably be a choice between new content, or attempting (attempting!) to put in online co-op. We may put this to a vote.

We're also going to once again look into that long-standing white boxes bug with old graphics cards, which is a tricky one. Also high priority but not belonging to any one update, I'd like to continue to improve modding support for Death Road. Eventually, we'd love to have Steam Workshop support. It's just a big investment, so we have to get other things out of the way first. Another big missing thing is the Endless Mode I wanted to do for a long time now. I know this will show up, just not sure in which update.
Let me know what you think of our plans and our updates so far! For fun, I'm ending this post with a quick summary of all the Death Road to Canada updates up to this point, with commentary! Let's take a trip down MEMORY LANE (over the last 6 months). The Big Changelog: - Made Car Breakdown less subject to RNG. This could lead to some really crappy situations when it was in, like your car breaking down after 3 turns. - New healing system! Before you'd only heal during camps. The new system is the current one, where you heal during the road conversations. - Adjustments to medical so that high medical takes 1 supply per health, and bad medical takes more supplies. Before, it was always 2 per healing. - More medical skill gives more attempts at healing. We had this before, but it was a lot more subdued. Really, we've buffed medical a lot. - You can no longer get 6 medical skill just by healing teammates, now it stops at 3. - Dogs are much easier to teach to drive a car. Before this was a super hidden event! I decided this was too brutal and kind of anti-climactic. - The old, rarer method of dog driver training is still in, and now gives extra stat bonuses. - Bug that was in the game for awhile that made it easy to run through big crowds of zombies. Woops. - Boomerang nerf, before you could super rapidly attack with it by using it close up against zombies. Rest in Pieces. - "Toilets adjusted" in the patch notes. I think this is when we added the toilet genie, and we just didn't tell anyone. - Melee weapons buffs over time. Trader melee weapon prices kept going down. Heavy melee weapons cleave more now. Lots of these. TIP: Firearms are still better, though they probably should be. - Lots of AI revamps to the followers. This ended up taking a pretty big chunk of time, more than we expected. This was worth it in the end, since they're a lot less death prone than they used to be. Still fairly death prone. - New system added where you can specify COMBAT and TACTICS orders for your group. This was a big one! - Fix for a very mysterious bug with Familiar Characters. For awhile, if you did NOT hit "Randomize" at some point during the creation of a custom character, it would have the same seed as your other characters. This meant that only one custom character would show up per game, or none if your starter characters also had the same seed. This was a tough one to figure out! We got a lot of help from Twitch streamers on this. - Took some trees out of the UFO special encounter because your car could get stuck on a tree forever. - Changed how weapons come out of safes when they're opened. Before they'd appear UNDER the safe way too much. - Renamed "temperament" to "composure". I will regret this decision to my dying day. - Fix for anime girl not appearing because the code that changed her name to [HER NAME]-chan would sometimes break the game. - Deja Vu event now considers what car you really started with. It also remembers if the alligator ate your keys or not. I hope you're HAPPY now. - Fixed a bug that made the chainsaw way weaker than it was intended to. It does less damage when low on gas, and the bug made it always think it was low on gas. Now it's overpowered as hell. - More Friend of Dog options added to events. Anime Girl options added to events that involve anime. Plus other weird rare cases like this. - Slightly smaller cities with less buildings, but with more guaranteed food. I think this really helped some pacing and RNG issues, even though the change looked small. - Cinderblocks, tires, and big tires no longer have nearly infinite amounts of health. - Coffee can no longer kill you. Coffee overdose no longer permanently cripples you forever. Not sure if I made the right decision with these fixes, either. - Molotov buffs. Before their tweaks, they were nearly completely useless, except sometimes you could win a map with an infinite fire domino effect. Still not perfect, I want to tweak fire based weapons in COCCYX or BRAINSTEM. - Robbery megafailures will no longer outright KILL your main robber. Now the most it does is 2 damage, in most cases. This was a big buff to the Bandit strategy, but it didn't change how this murders most Twitch streamers. That's how I know it's still balanced. - Turning a special character into a dog will now unlock their main weapon. This is pretty exploitable, though I don't see many people use it since it's rare. Imagine getting L*nk's sword on any character. - Fix for the ENTIRE WORLD becoming filled with Zombie Cops if you found a single Zombie Cop. I still consider putting this bug back in. - New perks! Martial Artist, Big Bruiser, Gun Collector. - Berserk buffed. It used to give one less point in Fitness, Shooting, and Strength. It also didn't let you go over the maximum before, making it mostly a penalty. - Civilized nerfed! It used to only have a -2 morale penalty instead of -3. It's still probably one of the best traits in the game. - Big redesign of the endgame! It used to have 2 nearly identical sieges, then an optional city you could loot before the Canadian Border. The 2 sieges and optional city was consolidated into the current City of Crushed Hopes. We got a lot of complaints over the old way, though in a future update I still want to add more alternate options for the endgame. - Less cars in the broken-down-car-road events. Before they covered the map, and couldn't be moved around. This in combination with the old AI didn't work too great. - More loyalty reveals added to a lot of the old events. Before it was too hard to ever figure out who was loyal or not in your group. The AORTA update actually adds a couple new ways to figure out teammate loyalty, too. - More zombie clowns - Special character revamps. Lots of little ones, including the time we made it so they could have less than 3 weapon slots. Also added new characters like Gordo, Panda, and more. - FIERCE CLAWS added for the panda and later, cats. - The Last Bodybuilder buffs because he deserves to be buffed. - DSYP fart improvements. Fart sounds, fart graphics, fart rebalance, you name it. - DSYP used to have infinite farts due to a bug. He'd fart, and a teammate would die instead of him. After this, he could run through the game killing every zombie onscreen by mashing the fart button. Maybe we'll bring this back in some form??? - Dogs can no longer eat chocolate. - Losing a character now usually causes their weapons to drop into the trunk automatically. Before, you'd just lose them forever. This was pretty brutal so we changed it to the current system. - EASIER BANDITS revamp. Bandits used to take the same amount of supplies and do the same amount of damage in all modes. Now they don't get super brutal until Deadlier Road and beyond. - Multiple difficulty nerfs over time to the no-car-walking events. Especially the supply loss ones, which I think got nerfed on 3 separate occasions. - Toilet genie can no longer be eaten by zombies. This was a horrible change that I protested to the best of my abilities. - Removed all the fake un-recruitable dogs in pet shops because it confused people. I do kind of miss the swarm of useless dogs. - Halloween update! New weapons, location, and recruitable characters. This also added cats, ahead of schedule. - Big revamp to the "Drive to Another Location" system. Before you could reroll your location for gas, but it would just give you a random one. Explorer used to give more rerolls, for cheaper. Now it's the "pick a location" system, which works a lot better. - Fixed a bug that prevented Ultrafit from giving you extra starting food. This bug was in the game for about four months. - Being able to sleep in shifts doesn't make you TIRED if you have a party big enough to handle it. - Making it easier to grab things off shelves. For a long time, you couldn't loot the top shelves if they were against a wall. WOOPS. - Gave the player way more control of moving weapons in and out of the car trunk on the road and during events. - Wrangling the co-op controls code over time. - Vehicle tab in road pause screen shows what game mode you're playing. - Lots of little balance tweaks that I didn't write above because they weren't interesting enough to talk about separately. All the tweaks really add up. - Lots of little quality of life features! Things like showing more stats, what game modes have been beaten. We still have a big list of these to do. - Lots of bugfixes! Especially to weird rare cases. - Way more stuff I left out because I got tired of typing! I'm going back to work on the AORTA update!