Hey everyone, hope you’re doing well!
We wanted to take a bit of time to talk to you about Bodycam and the studio, to share with you the reality of what these past six months have been like, and everything we’ve been working on. This is going to be a longer message that touches on a lot of different topics, but we think it’s worth it. It’s something we will do more often: giving you an inside look at the problems we’ve faced, how we solved them, how we’re planning the future of the game and the studio, and what our ambitions are.
On the technical side, we’ve been through a lot of heavy tasks that took time (and maybe the question is, why did they take so much time?). The biggest challenge, and probably the biggest issue for Bodycam right now, has been optimization. Even though Bodycam is a fairly recent project built on brand-new tech and tools that themselves aren’t always fully optimized yet, there’s still a huge amount of work we can do on our side, and we’ve been doing it. Optimization is never “done”, there’s always more to improve, but over the past months we’ve tackled some of the hardest and most time-consuming parts. We re-imported and reworked basically all of the game’s textures, we upgraded Unreal Engine through several versions to bring the project to the latest one, and we fixed everything that broke along the way (plugins, debug systems, features that suddenly stopped working). On top of that, we ran full audits, rewrote parts of the code that weren’t holding up, and solved a mountain of side issues created by these upgrades.
On the content side, we decided to use this time to focus on the bigger updates. Since the technical side was mainly being handled by our external partners, we focused on the most time-consuming features. And the truth is, with Bodycam, we can’t just cut corners. Our rule is that whenever we release something, it has to be pushed to the maximum of realism and detail. That’s both the cool part and sometimes the painful part of working on this project. It means we often end up redoing things that technically already “worked fine,” simply because they weren’t good enough by our standards. And this will always be part of the DNA of Bodycam. There will be times when we’ll tell you: “yes, this system was working, nobody complained, but we rebuilt it anyway.” Because that’s how we make sure Bodycam always stays at the very top of what’s possible in terms of realism. A good example is the animation system. It was already solid. Nobody was asking for a change. But for us, it wasn’t enough. So we remade every single animation. We added a ton of new elements to make it more realistic, redesigned the whole system from the ground up, and even though you’ve seen a glimpse of it in the devlog, there’s still a lot more you haven’t seen yet.
The same goes for the Loadout. We could have just added a handful of optics, a few grips, a couple of stocks per weapon, and called it a day. That would’ve been more than enough for most people. But that’s not what we wanted. We wanted to mirror reality as closely as possible and in real life, you can find thousands of parts and optics. So we went all in: we went to shooting ranges, looked at what exists, and started building a database that grows every day – hundreds of optics, hundreds of stocks, and new ones being added daily. It took a massive amount of time, but it’s what makes Bodycam unique. And we didn’t stop there. We applied the same philosophy to the drones and the RCs. I can’t tell you exactly how they’ll be used yet (you’ll have to guess), but just like weapons, they come with their own loadout system. You’ll be able to swap wheels, change the body shell, customize spoilers, add stickers, replace antennas, edit rotors, change cameras, and more. For drone and RC fans (like myself), the goal was simple: to allow you to recreate the drone or RC car you have at home inside Bodycam. That’s something we find amazing. Of course, the flip side of this philosophy is that it makes updates slower. If we had cut down 200 attachments, nobody would have noticed. If we had kept the old animations, the game would still be good. But it’s the DNA. That’s why updates sometimes feel far apart (and later in this message, I’ll explain how we’re going to fix that).
At the same time, over the past few months we’ve gone through a huge leap forward doubling our team and starting new collaborations with additional partners. We strengthened Reissad to improve the game.
Today, we are supported by trusted partners and new collaborators. This growth allowed us to upgrade workflows, file sharing, build testing, QA, production, and remote coordination across time zones. The most rewarding part has been welcoming specialists in every field experts far more skilled than us in their domains who share the same vision and passion. Together, we will continue to optimize our workflows to deliver Bodycam at the quality we target.
Of course, such a fast team scale-up required us to set up a lot of processes and find our rhythm. But now that the biggest gap is behind us, we can fully focus on content.
We know communication hasn’t been great. When we stopped working with our first comms team, we didn’t immediately have a replacement, and we ended up with long gaps without saying much. Part of it was that we were just so deep into development that we didn’t see the time pass. And honestly, we didn’t want to spam you with boring things, half-teasers or constant pings when the real work wasn’t ready to show. But we’ve seen how much you liked the devlogs and dev leaks, how much you appreciated being part of the process, and we know we need to do more of that. That’s why we’re now putting together a proper marketing and community team, so there will always be updates, content, devlogs, things to show you, without it depending on whether or not the developers find a free evening to write something. Now, one of the biggest questions is: how do we make sure these long delays don’t keep happening in the future? Because yes, right now updates have taken a long time, and we know it’s frustrating (for you and for us too). After the two big updates we’re working on now (Zombies and the Major Update), the structure of the team will change. The core Bodycam team, the one that started it all and has now grown a lot, will keep working on the huge updates. That kind of update is always going to take time (four, five, sometimes six months to build), and while it’s part of Bodycam’s DNA to do these ambitious, system-level reworks, in parallel, a new live ops team will take care of regular content, smaller features, balance tweaks, bug fixes, seasonal events – basically, the kind of things that keep the game alive and exciting between the big milestones. This way, we won’t have those long gaps anymore. It’s something we couldn’t do until now, because the whole team was buried in the same massive tasks. But with the studio growing and with the structure we’ve built, it finally becomes possible.
Halloween: the big Zombie mode update, with a brand-new map, secrets, weapons, and all the performance improvements mentioned above. We’re still in heavy QA phase for it, and we won’t release it if it isn’t ready, but we’re confident for Halloween. January - February: the Loadout update, which also includes the fully reworked animation system. You’ve already seen a glimpse of it in the devlog, but this update will go much further.
[UPDATE PLEASE READ - The previously anticipated target window communicated has changed. Over the past months, the team has been hard at work and has made significant changes into the structure of the game to make it much more stable. Rather than rushing a partial or unstable version, we have chosen to take the necessary time to complete this work properly and polish the next game update. We will share more informations once we are ready]
For us, this period has been both frustrating and rewarding. Frustrating because the gap since release has been significant. But since launch, we’ve transformed the studio into something far stronger, investing heavily and building beyond ourselves. Projects of this scale take time to show results, but that progress is real and soon the game will fully reflect the growth we’ve achieved. What kept us going is that we know the potential of Bodycam. We see it every day, and we know many of you see it too (it’s something that comes back again and again in reviews and feedback). That belief, shared between us and the community, is what kept us motivated to keep building even when nothing visible was coming out. In the past, we focused so much on building that we didn’t communicate enough, hoping the game would speak for itself. We’ve learned from that. Now, with a dedicated communication team, we will share regular updates and give you a clear window into Bodycam’s progress. So yes, there are still things in the game we want to improve, things we wish could go faster. But nothing is being left behind. Everything is being worked on, and no matter how long it takes, it will get done. And when it is, we’ll finally be proud to show the Bodycam we’ve been building for you all this time.