Hello everyone! ːsteamhappyː
We hope you had wonderful Holidays and properly celebrated the end of 2021. New year is here and we‘ve got some exciting news to share with you all! We know we tend to go radio silent for longer periods of time, but the game is far from abandoned and we‘ve been working tirelessly on the project to meet our internal deadlines.
Experimental Branch
New update should come into the experimental branch of the game relatively soon. However, it‘s still too early to set a specific date. We‘ll need to test all the changes we‘ve made before going live and the experimental branch is the way to do it.
You‘ll get to play the update early (albeit in potentially unstable form) and your feedback will help us find bugs and problems. We‘ll keep you posted about the availability of the experimental branch of the update.
We‘ve been working on many „behind-the-scenes“ changes in networking, save game stability, optimizations and other features. The update should hopefully once again improve performance considerably across the board.
More bug fixes and new features will be gradually introduced throughout the testing period leading up to the console release in April, which will correspond with the public release of the update on Steam.
New Translations
Together with the release on consoles, we are also planning on having the game translated into more languages. We can guarantee a Japanese translation with more languages currently being in the talks.
At the moment, there‘s no telling how many more translations we‘ll manage to secure in time for the console release, but we‘ll do our best to get as many of the most requested languages as possible.
The State of the Studio
As big of a success as Hobo is, it can‘t sustain our studio indefinitely. We need to look to the future if we are to bring more of our ideas to life. At the same time we‘d like to avoid a burnout from working on the same project for such a long time.
Hobo and its console ports is not the only thing we‘ve been working on in the past few months. We‘ve put as much (if not more) effort into improving our studio and internal infrastructure.
We secured more office space, hired more talent, and acquired new technologies, all of which help us not only with the development of Hobo, but with our new next-gen project as well.
Without sharing too much, we can tell you that our next project will also be a cross-genre hybrid. The following environmental concept art and sketches might offer some insight into the possible setting and overall atmosphere of the game:
