Patch merging, development situation, and upcoming features report.

Hello everybody!

A small report about the current development and situation.

We are happy to say that our merging of the Midway Branch and Main branch went nearly without any problems. Minor bugs here and there were found and reported by our community, mostly by the in-game report system, which were of course fixed as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, while building our project for the next patch, our 11-year-old workstation finally decided that it had enough and died. It took us some time and resources but we were able to buy new parts (fix what was fixable) and improve the state of the workstation to the level which will make working on Penkura much more pleasant.

Just to make sure that nobody will be worried about the project. We lost only about two and a half weeks of work and 90% of it was just object placement, no assets were lost, and everything is safe and sound.

As of 7th March, we are back on track and are working to release the patch as soon as possible. We just need to add back all the assets ( models, sounds, animations, navigation, missions, dialogs, and so on) back where they were before the unfortunate event (Our apologies for the delay).

Also, some good news, when the main workstation was down for maintenance we didn't waste the time and worked on other features that were planned a little bit later for Penkura.

As of now, I can report, that the Bot programming feature (in-game programming by players) is well into development and should be presented next month.
The research system is also well in development and should be available in the basic form already in the upcoming patch.
We also started translation of our game, and we decided that we will open translation to the community (this is, of course, optional, translation will be made by LionsArt nevertheless but the community may help to speed up the process), more about this in the upcoming patch notes.

One last note, we notice that a lot of users provide feedback or even changes request via the in-game bug report system, usually because they don't want to use Discord, or are too shy to use their main account for communication. Because of that, we will be adding the Feedback and Feature request option in our communication form within the game, which will allow players to fully privately and anonymously send us messages.

Till the next Dev-Com over and out.