Hi everyone,
Many of you are curious about how it’s going with our next major update, Simulator, so this post is intended to bring you up to date.
In the past five months since the previous post, there's been a lot of progress made on the update. It is currently in the final stages, and we are putting a lot of effort to release it as soon as possible. That said, there's still plenty of work left to do. We think we're about 3-5 months away from the release. Please understand that this is an estimate based on the current status, and it still may change.
It's been a very productive and busy period, which brought us significant improvements to graphics, UX, train simulation and bug fixes. Our team, which grew from six to nine members last year, has further solidified its coordination and workflow in the meantime, and has been hard at work continuously.
What made it difficult to share our progress more openly and establish a reliable release date is that, as we were developing Simulator, we were also cleaning up the project on the fly, which is a rather unpredictable process. As we explained in the previous post, we took this direction now because we see it as the most valuable course of action in the long run.
That is still part of the reason why we don't share more screenshots and videos about the update - it'll all be displayed when it's done. Another, bigger reason, is that with the release of Simulator, the price of Derail Valley for new buyers will be increased to $35.99. We want to delay the update as long as necessary until we're sure that our game is undoubtedly worth that price. It is because of this, too, that we want to attract attention after the update is released, not before.
All that contributes to us being more quiet than usual in this period, but rest assured that the update is in continual full development. It already is the biggest project we've ever worked on. While some of the upcoming features have been announced before in broad terms, at this point we can list them in a bit more detail:
(open images in a new tab for higher resolution)
All of the listed features and content are either done or nearing completion. They will be showcased in full detail in our In-Depth video series in days prior to the release.
At this point we’re past the major reworks too. For a few months already our daily work has been revolving around bringing everything together to a coherent whole. That alone is a challenge in terms of coordination, UX and performance and will take at least a few more months to finish and test properly. We also want to have enough time to dedicate to marketing, once it is all stable.
With that I'd like to remind everyone that we’re still a small team living off of the game’s sales and not a high-budget AAA studio that some are comparing us to. Our gateway to more resources and increased production is Simulator itself, which is why we are so careful to do it right, and to not overhype it before it is made publicly available.
During the development of Simulator we’ve also managed to work on things that are yet to come after the update, such as new industries and cities, new cargo types, new locomotives and cars, gameplay improvements and other, mainly of art and design nature. We'll probably have more information about those later next year, after Simulator.
If you're wondering about Simulator beta - please note that we already have a very helpful, carefully assembled closed beta team. It is small, but sufficient for our needs, and has already helped us shape this update, significantly. Our bottleneck has always been in production, not testing. We will, however, further expand the beta team as we get closer to the release with winners of the upcoming translation contest. We'll have more information about that later, as first we need to finalize the game texts/features in order to start the translating process.
As always, thanks so much for your support and patience over the years! We'll see you in a few months with more information.
-Slobodan