Hey FRUKT Town!
Well, the time has come. Yeah yeah, u know exactly what I'm talking about! Time to announce the FRUKT release date. Aaand.. drumroll..
FRUKT releases on September 24!
And a bit earlier, on September 17, the promised demo update drops - some small fixes and one surprise I'm gonna keep quiet about for now. It'll also be the demo's last update: I'm taking the demo down from the page on release day. The reason is simple - the release version has moved so far ahead in quality that the demo misleads u more than it shows u the game at this point.
So what's inside the release? Everything I wrote about before + as u probably already guessed from the screenshot - improved blood. There's gonna be way more tomato sauce in FRUKT now. And I mean WAY more! It'll pool up instead of endlessly stacking on itself, it'll show up on Bob, it'll be everywhere! (evil chef laughter)
And a few more pretty important news about the release and the future of FRUKT.
1) The release is early access, not a full release
No, not because I want to sell u a raw unfinished version - like I said, FRUKT will be exactly what I promised u before, or even cooler. And no, not because I want to ship buggy low quality crap. It's way simpler than that - it's the best way to tell players what my plans for this game are.
What I told u before - "1.5-7 years of updates with a rising price, but a full release right away" - is basically the early access model, just one that for some reason isn't called early access. I have a LOT of plans for this game, and I want everyone who opens FRUKT to know that there's still a ton of stuff coming.
So to sum up: for u as a player nothing changes, except that my promise about updates is now locked in one more place.
2) I'm using AI agents to program FRUKT
I already wrote about this in Discord, but I'm duplicating it here - I want every player to be as informed as possible about how I work before they buy the game.
So here's the deal: I started using AI agents to program FRUKT. For u as a player this means one thing - updates will come out faster. How much faster I can't say yet, but so far the speed increase is suspiciously huge. Let me clear up a few common worries right away:
This won't hurt the quality of the game - I review everything my silicon bro writes and I'm still making all the key decisions in the code. If anything, quality goes up, since now I have more time and room for polishing and debugging. Remember: I'm the one responsible for the quality of this game, not the AI. If I wanted to make FRUKT crap, I had plenty of time to achieve that goal already.
This only applies to coding. Game design, coming up with features, game architecture, 3D models, judging quality and generally any creative work is still done by your meat bro and his friends. Important: I'm not promising it'll stay this way forever, we live in very dynamic and unpredictable times. What I do promise is this: if something changes, I will tell u about it. I'm not gonna use AI quietly.
And about the formal side. Steam has a mandatory AI disclosure, but it's about content u see and hear in the game itself - development tools don't fall under it, Valve says directly that efficiency gains from those aren't the point of that form. So technically I could list nothing at all. But I'm putting the AI usage into the disclosure on the page anyway - I just feel better when u know more rather than less. And if AI content ever ends up in the game itself, u'll hear about it right here.
Thanks for your attention!