Seasons greetings, Captain! As 2019 rapidly approaches, we wanted to extend our thanks for your support, and we hope you have a very happy holiday season :) This year has been a whirlwind. Releasing into Early Access, that night hitting 4th in the Global Top Sellers chart on Steam, and three Major Updates that have massively improved the game. Of course, we're not stopping there, and we have plenty more planned before we call the game version 1.0!

Roadmap

Our Roadmap was overdue an update, which we posted up on our website in November. If you haven't seen it already, you can find it by clicking here.
Since we released "The Haunted Seas" we've been busy working on Major Update 04, which contains a bunch of new systems and two new Regions. We'll be sticking this on the Beta Branch in mid-January, and we'll explain all the cool new stuff when we launch it. Before we got stuck into the new content, we spent some time performing necessary infrastructural work. As the game has been expanding, our memory usage was creeping up, and this was jeopardising performance on the minimum spec machines. We've finished this work, so we're a lot less memory hungry now, and the game boots up a lot faster on my ancient PC, too! While we were doing these changes, we also greatly optimised the save file size, which is now significantly smaller than originally, and makes Cloud Save support more viable. All of this work puts us in a good place as we rapidly expand the game world and move toward full release. You'll notice all of these changes in the next update.

Abandon Ship On-Tour

In mid-November we were busy doing a couple of shows. The first was the UK Games Fund Awards up in Dundee.
-- Team Lead Gary Burchell (second from right) on a panel at the UKGF Awards -- Dundee was a very appropriately-themed place for our visit, not only containing the HMS Unicorn and RRS Discovery, but it also had a bar called Abandon Ship!
-- The RRS Discovery (Left), and what looks like a lovely place for a drink (Right)! -- After Scotland, we immediately jetted off to Portugal to demo the game as part of the Indie X area in Lisbon Games Week.
-- The convention centre was open 10am till 11pm, so we packed in a lot of players over the weekend. -- It was lovely to meet so many keen local players and fellow-developers.

Discord & Newsletter

We've finally got round to verifying our Discord server. If you'd like to join, click here.
I have a terrible habit of spilling the beans on what we're working on, so you'll often get screenshots of upcoming content before anywhere else. Also, for those that didn't know, we have a newsletter. Signing up means you get your name in the game as a randomly generated crew member. If you're interested in reading the full details of that, click here. The sign-up form is at the bottom of that web-page.
As well as getting your name in the game, every Newsletter we reveal something about Abandon Ship never before shown outside of the team. The last newsletter showed concept art for our new biome!
While we'll be taking a short break to see our families over Christmas, we'll be back before you know it, finishing off Major Update 4. During the holidays I'll be keeping an eye on our support and social channels should anything need attention. Happy Holidays, from Gary, Adam and Alex. (Oh, and the Christmas Kraken, too...)

[ 2018-12-19 15:44:01 CET ] [ Original post ]