Hi everyone,
We’ve built out a plan for our remaining work on SENTRY, so we thought we’d create a new Roadmap post.
First, if you haven’t been keeping updated on the changes thus far then you can read up on the Major Updates in these posts:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/4235154200342543684
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/526460937466544207
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/534357354429284567
The High Level Plan
After deriving a list of new features, content and adjustments we’ve been splitting these into our planned remaining updates.
The first of these will arrive in Major Update 4, which will be out before the end of the year. We’ll then graduate from Early Access with a full release update in spring 2026.
We’re still supporting our previous game even years after its v1.0 release, and you can expect the same on SENTRY too.
General Additions
Every update we aim to include some new levels, equipment and enemies.
The remaining enemies we’re planning on prioritising utilise a gameplay mechanic that hasn’t been used in-game yet. We like to keep some surprises but I’ll talk about the first one of these in the August Dev Transmission – we showed concept art for this particular enemy before, and you can now see the associated in-game model that’s incoming:
We usually have a few headline features in mind when thinking about Major Updates. But there’s a bunch of other important work we’re planning on spreading across forthcoming updates, such as:
- Reworking turrets. There are a few issues with them currently, but the biggest problems are the combination of new players finding turrets hard to learn, but experienced players placing them effectively where they become too powerful, with no valid counter. We’ll be looking to make adjustments to solve this while making them more fun to use in general.
- Improving hazards and rewards. Making some of the less effective rewards more meaningful, introducing hazards that provide greater variety (rather than just a player debuff) and general balancing
- Adding some form of “hard mode” toggle in the campaigns, where there’ll be optional challenges for players to select (including hazard stacking).
- Creating a menu that can be viewed during loadout where you can view useful things like active hazards and enemies
- Merged Boarding Parties – this will reduce the instances of re-playing the same level multiple times in a row
- Extra ships, and making the existing ones better
- More ways to increase your slots during a run
- Additional tiers of Supply Beacon
- Revisiting Mastered Upgrades
- Reducing the number of upgrades that Gear has, so we can make them more effective sooner
- A mechanic where you retain something of your choice between runs
- Making status effects have greater differences to one another
- Introducing some gameplay to the Guardian Camera (we’ll potentially make this something the player can choose to re-spawn into for Singleplayer, too)
- We’re conscious that in co-op, we inject increased challenge by escalating the breach points that get used – but this often means players are fighting separately. We can do something better here
- Additional variety to the navigator
- There’s issues with different enemy speeds meaning that sometimes waves can end in a very anti-climactic manner, we need to tighten this up
- Full gamepad support
- Extra game modes
- Implementing the Vendor
This isn’t the full list of course; if I listed every single thing we’re planning on addressing this post would be the length of a novel :)
Needless to say, every Major Update comes with a bunch of polish, bug-fixing, optimisations and balancing too.
Major Update 4
The main focus for MU4 is the replacement system for passive gear that we’ve mentioned in previous posts.
When we initially released SENTRY, passive gear entailed the Jump Jets, Armour and Bandolier. We made the Jump Jets a default ability, built Armour into the Crew System and while the Bandolier will remain in some form, you’ll now be able to equip multiple slots of passive abilities that provide additional combat bonuses and gameplay variety. We’ll talk about this more in a future post.
We’ll be looking to implement as many general additions into MU4 as possible.
Full Release
As well as the usual extra levels, enemies, equipment etc. this update’s main focus is the addition of a new campaign with a suitable game ending. We’ll also be re-framing the narrative around the existing two campaigns in such a way that it makes sense when viewed collectively. This will include some visual changes to make it feel like you’re going on more of a journey. We’re all very excited about the changes in this update, but I’ll resist spoilers for now…
We’d like to introduce a new tutorial/prologue that gives a better introduction to the game and the full release update is an appropriate time to revisit this.
A lot of people have been asking for a Codex: it’ll be in for Full Release, with a special surprise tied into it as well.
We’ll also be adding achievements for this update.
Post-Release
On our previous game that was in Early Access, we released a free Major Update after Full Release. We found this was useful because Full Release tends to bring in a new wave of players, and with them a lot of extra feedback. This update addressed that new feedback. It also gave us an opportunity to squeeze in some fun but non-essential additions that didn’t quite make v1.0.
This worked well on Abandon Ship and it’s highly likely we’d do the same on SENTRY.
And Beyond…
Once we have our full suite of music we’ll release the soundtrack. On our previous game we did an Art Book; this was something we enjoyed putting together so it’s likely we’ll do the same for SENTRY.
If there’s demand from the community we can look at other DLC, but that’s something we’ll only consider once we’re well past version 1.0.
On our first game, even after the free Major Update was released we continued to support the game with several free content updates – the most recent in April this year. Each game is special to us, so any excuse to add something cool is seized upon – and I expect to give the same level of support to SENTRY.
More items will undoubtedly get added to the list as we continue development, so while this is our current plan sometimes things can change – but we’ll keep you updated as we go. We’re also keeping a few surprises in store too :)
As ever, the best thing you can do is keep telling us your thoughts. We go through every single post, comment and review, logging it into a big tracker which helps us focus on the most important aspects. So please keep doing that!
Thanks for your support,
The SENTRY crew
