It’s not the end of the world

We’ve had a last-minute change of plans, and pretty big changes at that.

Let’s get the big news out of the way:

1. We’re pushing the launch of Guntouchables to Thursday, August 7th.
   
2. We’ve decided to launch to 1.0, rather than early access as previously announced.
   

The rest of this post is about why these decisions fell into place. As we’ll reiterate down below, we’ve still got the exact same post-launch plans for Guntouchables as we had before, so don’t worry about us scaling back ambitions or cutting anything. We’re just pushing the timeline a bit, and we'll explain why.

I guess we’re not the first doomsday preppers to get the date wrong for the apocalypse.

[h2]Why the delay?[/h2]

In our discussions leading up to launch, we realized that we’ve effectively been operating like Guntouchables was in early access for the past six months.

We ran several playtests, and pushed out multiple game updates based on what we learned. We’ve kindled a little Discord community around the game already, and implemented lots of game features from their discussions and feedback. Looking at our development checklist, we’ve pretty much done everything we initially wanted to get from early access.

This puts us at a point where early access feels a little redundant. We don’t think it’d be best for the game, and we don’t want to dilute the meaning and experience of early access for other developers.

Because we feel Guntouchables is now closer to 1.0 than early access, we’d rather just give it a couple more minutes in the oven and launch right to 1.0.

[h2]Considering the meaning of early access[/h2]

As game developers, we’ve got a lot more tools to do early access and open development than we used to. This is, generally speaking, a good thing: it’s way easier to create communities around your games, to connect with players, and to put draft versions of what you’re working on out in the world.

But in our case, this also makes it easy to end up basically doing early access without realizing it. This can be nice. But we also see how it sort of changes the meaning of the whole thing. Early access is still a terrific tool for a lot of projects, but we realized it’s no longer the right tool for where Guntouchables is at now.

Most of us can think of an example of a game that launched to early access when it could have (or maybe should have) just been a 1.0 release. We don’t want to end up in that situation, especially when we feel we’ve brought Guntouchables past the development goals we set out when we first looked into early access.

That’s why we made the call to push the release a bit and launch right to 1.0 instead. It feels like a more honest reflection of where the game is at, and like the healthier move for how we as game developers define and practice early access.

[h2]Our plans after launch[/h2]

It’s important to say that our swap to 1.0 doesn’t mean we’re done updating Guntouchables after release.

We’ve still got the same development plans we had last week, and the week before. More content, missions, metaprogression, guns, enemies and more is on the way. And we’ll still be chatting with everyone on the Guntouchables Discord, eager to hear your ideas on where we can go from here. So in a sense, nothing’s changed there. Our post-launch ambitions are still the same.

As we work toward our 1.0 release on August 7th, we’ll also put together a new road map to share our next development goals. Keep an eye out for that.


[hr][/hr]

Alright, we’re heading back into the bunker to make sure everything’s ready for release.

Thanks for reading, thanks for your interest in GUNTOUCHABLES, and thanks for your patience and understanding. And sorry for the last-minute switcheroo. Game development can be a bit chaotic and unpredictable sometimes. But hey, it’s not the end of the world.

We’ll see you on August 7th to greet the apocalypse with open arms. Doomsday is going to be a great day.

XOXO
Game Swing