Escape The Pacific News

Hello Players!

What a fantastic first 6 months of the year we had! Thanks to your feedback and bug reports we managed to not only solve game-breaking bugs but also to implement new features requested by the community. Your contribution means the world to us! Really. Without your help we wouldn’t be where we are now. Thank you!

Thank you for your patience, dedication and most of all for sticking with us!

Now, that we released version Alpha 60 on the normal branch, it’s time for us to recharge our batteries and enjoy a couple of days off. This means that regular updates will be paused as listed below. We will still be available on Discord for all of you and please drop us a message and tag us, especially if you encounter new, annoying bugs. Please also continue using the “Report bug” feature in the game menu. We don’t want to come back from our days off and have nothing to do ːsteamhappyː

Here’s a rough plan of what you can expect during the coming weeks and months:

1. Next regular update planned for mid September (Experimental branch)
   
2. Same update will move to the normal branch around early October
   
3. Starting early October we plan on resuming our normal schedule
   
4. Regular updates will continue on the same 3 monthly rotation as usual
   

We are aware that some of you are used to more frequent game updates, however, releasing new features every week/month is very risky. We have experienced it in the past, where frequent updates introduced game-breaking bugs. Some of them still lurking around.

Escape the Pacific is now at a development stage where we can’t afford the risk of releasing fast updates anymore, like in the past years. Looking at the most recent approach where we release updates on a 3-monthly basis (sometimes with a small delay) we can see that these updates are more stable. While they still have minor bugs, these are in most cases easy to fix.

As you have already experienced on Discord our team grew in volunteers. This allows us to perform better and more intensive QA testing of new features, before we release them to the players.

Good things take time and a great community! The community is there... All we need now is more time ːsteammockingː

We wish you an enjoyable summer and we will see you in a couple of weeks well rested for the next adventure in the Pacific!

Thank you! Every single one of you! You are amazing!

On behalf of G4G Team,
Peter

Hi everyone,

In this build we focused mainly on fixing bugs. We also added exciting new features too, requested by the community. These are: Hill Island, Degrading Skills and the long awaited Item Holders.

Hill Island
You can now explore a brand new island of type “Big Forest Island with Hill feature”. Besides enjoying beautiful scenery views with various Hill types, this feature offers new possibilities to build a homestead in different weather conditions: While the wind is stronger at the top of the hill, the foothold of the hill can provide shade and protection.

“The newly added Hill Island feature will provide a plethora of possibilities not only for us as developers, but also for the players. Imagine building your homestead at the top of the hill, with a fresh water pond, where you can fish fresh water fish and use in new cooking recipes. Or imagine building your base at the foothold of the island with a beautiful waterfall in the background, providing a gravity fed piping mechanism to water your garden. How cool would that be?

Peter, Developer & CEO”

Degrading Skills
A true game changer is the new skills mechanic, where acquired skills slowly degrade if not used. This makes the game more challenging and the achieved skill levels more valuable. Once a skill starts degrading, regaining it back happens much faster, up until it reaches the initial level before it started degrading.

Example:

• Player achieved diving skill level 7
  
• Player doesn’t dive for a longer period of time
  
• The diving skill slowly degraded to level 6
  
• Player dives again and regains diving skill level 7, which happens much faster than it initially took to achieve diving level 7
  
• After regaining the skill back, gaining higher levels happens at the usual normal pace
  

“Implementing the mechanics of degrading skills is a topic that we were talking about internally for a long time and I am very happy to see it finally come to life. Sure, this is the first iteration and it will require balancing based on player feedback, however, this new mechanic will enable us to build interactive quests and tutorials around it and we hope it will motivate the player to explore new areas and value achieved skills even more.

Radu, Game Designer”

Item Holders
Your survivalist life just got easier and more organized. Clean up around your base, bring resources from other islands back to your homestead safely or keep them nice and tidy attached to your raft.

The following item holders were added:

• Small Stick Holder
  
• Fire Stick Holder
  
• Leaves Holder
  
• Coconut Holder
  

They work like the Trunk Holder and can be attached to the raft too.

Surprise Feature
Can you guess from our teaser video what this surprise feature is about? This one goes hand in hand with the new Hill Island. We will let you find this one out on your own ;)

Changelog:

New features:

1. Hill Island
2. Skill Degradation
3. Small Stick Holder
4. Fire Stick Holder
5. Leaves Holder
6. Coconut Holder

Fixes (highlights):

1. Object picking up issues
2. Object dragging issues
3. Broken raft modules after loading the game
4. Too dark ambient lighting at night
5. Sometimes disappearing collectibles and sunken ships
6. Sometimes disappearing dropped objects
7. Raft disappearing when exiting the Cluster perimeter

For the complete list of all (~38) bugfixes please see our hotfix list (english only):

Hotfix 1 Hotfix 2 Hotfix 3 Hotfix 4 Hotfix 5 Hotfix 6 Hotfix 7

We will continue prioritizing fixing new bugs while also revisiting older ones too.

The next planned additions are: Mud material, Primitive Stove, Water filtering, Reworked tutorials, Map UI, Old Telescope, Old Pistol, Spear, Dolphins, Simple Quests, Building modules aging and many more.

More new features are in the development pipeline and we will share them with you once we start actively working on them. First, we will deal with the implementation of the planned features and fixing bugs.

We have set up a Patreon for those who wish to support game development. Announcement page is here: Patreon News.

Thank you for your patience and for your constructive feedbacks helping us to get rid of the issues as fast as is possible.

Do you like our game and want to help even more during development? We look forward to every positive review posted on our Steam page and thank everyone who decides to support us along the way!



G4GTeam.

If you have any further questions do not hesitate to ask us. We will try to answer your questions in detail.



Patreon Discord Twitter Facebook Youtube

Special thanks to Carlos Garcia aka "Malkavnos" for helping out with the Spanish translation on short notice.

Hello everyone,

A new Hotfix (1) for Alpha 60.E1 (regular and experimental) is now available!

Changelog:
01. Changed: Updated the Credits page
02. Fixed: Putting multiple items in Item Holders works faster now

We would like to thank you all for your support, bug reports and feedback.

Best regards,

G4GTeam.

Hi everyone,

In this experimental build we focused mainly on fixing bugs. We also added exciting new features too, requested by the community. These are: Hill Island, Degrading Skills and the long awaited Item Holders.

To switch between stable and experimental game builds make sure game properties in your Steam client are set to either "Experimental" or "None" (which is the stable branch)

Hill Island
You can now explore a brand new island of type “Big Forest Island with Hill feature”. Besides enjoying beautiful scenery views with various Hill types, this feature offers new possibilities to build a homestead in different weather conditions: While the wind is stronger at the top of the hill, the foothold of the hill can provide shade and protection.

“The newly added Hill Island feature will provide a plethora of possibilities not only for us as developers, but also for the players. Imagine building your homestead at the top of the hill, with a fresh water pond, where you can fish fresh water fish and use in new cooking recipes. Or imagine building your base at the foothold of the island with a beautiful waterfall in the background, providing a gravity fed piping mechanism to water your garden. How cool would that be?

Peter, Developer & CEO”

Degrading Skills
A true game changer is the new skills mechanic, where acquired skills slowly degrade if not used. This makes the game more challenging and the achieved skill levels more valuable. Once a skill starts degrading, regaining it back happens much faster, up until it reaches the initial level before it started degrading.

Example:

• Player achieved diving skill level 7
  
• Player doesn’t dive for a longer period of time
  
• The diving skill slowly degraded to level 6
  
• Player dives again and regains diving skill level 7, which happens much faster than it initially took to achieve diving level 7
  
• After regaining the skill back, gaining higher levels happens at the usual normal pace
  

“Implementing the mechanics of degrading skills is a topic that we were talking about internally for a long time and I am very happy to see it finally come to life. Sure, this is the first iteration and it will require balancing based on player feedback, however, this new mechanic will enable us to build interactive quests and tutorials around it and we hope it will motivate the player to explore new areas and value achieved skills even more.

Radu, Game Designer”

Item Holders
Your survivalist life just got easier and more organized. Clean up around your base, bring resources from other islands back to your homestead safely or keep them nice and tidy attached to your raft.

The following item holders were added:

• Small Stick Holder
  
• Fire Stick Holder
  
• Leaves Holder
  
• Coconut Holder
  

They work like the Trunk Holder and can be attached to the raft too.

Surprise Feature
Can you guess from our teaser video what this surprise feature is about? This one goes hand in hand with the new Hill Island. We will let you find this one out on your own ;)

Changelog:

New features:

1. Hill Island
2. Skill Degradation
3. Small Stick Holder
4. Fire Stick Holder
5. Leaves Holder
6. Coconut Holder

Fixes (highlights):

1. Object picking up issues
2. Object dragging issues
3. Broken raft modules after loading the game
4. Too dark ambient lighting at night
5. Sometimes disappearing collectibles and sunken ships
6. Sometimes disappearing dropped objects
7. Raft disappearing when exiting the Cluster perimeter

For the complete list of all (~38) bugfixes please see our hotfix list (english only):

Hotfix 1 Hotfix 2 Hotfix 3 Hotfix 4 Hotfix 5 Hotfix 6 Hotfix 7

We will continue prioritizing fixing new bugs while also revisiting older ones too.

The next planned additions are: Mud material, Primitive Stove, Water filtering, Reworked tutorials, Map UI, Old Telescope, Old Pistol, Spear, Dolphins, Simple Quests, Building modules aging and many more.

More new features are in the development pipeline and we will share them with you once we start actively working on them. First, we will deal with the implementation of the planned features and fixing bugs.

We have set up a Patreon for those who wish to support game development. Announcement page is here: Patreon News.

Thank you for your patience and for your constructive feedbacks helping us to get rid of the issues as fast as is possible.

Do you like our game and want to help even more during development? We look forward to every positive review posted on our Steam page and thank everyone who decides to support us along the way!



G4GTeam.

If you have any further questions do not hesitate to ask us. We will try to answer your questions in detail.



Patreon Discord Twitter Facebook Youtube

Special thanks to Carlos Garcia aka "Malkavnos" for helping out with the Spanish translation on short notice.

Hello everyone,

A new Hotfix (7) for Alpha 59 and Alpha 59.E1 (regular and experimental) is now available!

Changelog:
01. Fixed: Raft moving backwards in FastSail mode
02. Fixed: Possibility to put Barrels on Campfire
03. Fixed: Player getting stuck between underwater objects (swim collider radius reduced)
04. Fixed: On New Game screen, after clicking on the "Sandbox" toggle, the "Next" button switched to "Start", rendering the button unusable and preventing the start of a new game
05. Fixed: Coconut pots levitating above the cooking surface (the rock) when placed around the camp fire

We would like to thank you all for your support, bug reports and feedback.

Best regards,

G4GTeam.