Early Access Updates - Porting, New Features, and Launch Date

Hi everyone,

slime here from Mangotronics.

It's been a while since the Early Access launch after Next Fest, and we have some news about what kind of updates we've been working on.

Firstly, we want to thank everyone who purchased the Early Access version, and want to assure you that we've been busy at work on a huuuuge overhaul to the game, including some new features that we're adding based on playtesting and your feedback (and even some of our own ideas).

In the last couple months, we've been learning a new engine and porting over everything from the existing legacy game engine to a new, more robust one that can handle gamepad inputs, text and screen resizing, and so many modern gameplay and interface features. Plus it will make it easier for us to ensure our SteamOS + Steam Deck builds are up to 100% accurate with the Mac and Windows versions too.

Overall, we have 5 main development phases that we're working on completing before launching a full v2.0 rollout of Passage: A Job Interview Simulator! Here's a short list of what the development phases look like and when we hope to complete them:

Phase 1: Planning/Asset creation - DONE! (As of May 1st)
Making sure that all the game art and sound assets were sized correctly and are the correct format (mp3 vs ogg, png vs jpg, videos and sound encoded in the right resolution and bitrate, etc. etc.)

Phase 2: Scripts importing and rewriting - DONE! (As of June 2nd)
Finally, after a long and arduous process of both recompiling using a custom scripting language transposer, and manual review, we've finally arrived at 0 errors in our code and are ready to start testing everything over in the new engine!

Phase 3: Parity Testing - On schedule to complete by June 20th
When we're porting over the game, we need to constantly look back on the original to make sure that everything looks as close to 100% accurate to the original version. There are a few unfortunate side-effects of porting over to a new engine like some animations and text effects that don't translate well to the new engine, which we have to redo from scratch in the code. Otherwise, this should take us just under 3 weeks to complete.

Phase 4: Quality of Life features - To complete by July 1st
Like mentioned above, there are a lot of features that our current engine doesn't have like the ability to remap controls and resize text. There are about 8 new QoL features in total that we've already added, and it's just a matter of making sure these all are tested and working on all 3 desktop platforms (and Steam Deck).

Phase 5: New gameplay features - To complete by July 12th
We're adding some more gameplay-oriented features and possibly some new ways you can interact with bosses and other characters during your time off work.

After all these are done, we're looking at roughly a July 21st August 1st rollout and leaving Early Access.
We'll have some more info later as we work to complete the latest version of the game.

Thank you for reading! And thank you again to all our testers, streamers, reviewers, friends and family who keep us inspired and motivated! <3
-slimehunter @ mangotronics