Hi everyone! It's now been a whole month (and a day) since launch. We're super thankful for everyone who have played the game in the meantime (all 1300 of you!). Since launch we've released 5 patches addressing stability and bugs, and 1 content update.
Getting to this point took a bit longer than we wanted it to, but now, we're finally in a state where we can start to look ahead. With that said, here's the roadmap! :D
We've kept our timeline short deliberately so we can respond more quickly to feedback and suggestions. We hope to get to the end of this in the next couple of months, but you never know.
We're already in full swing, working on the next big update which will feature the cave biome, more treasures, re-balanced progression, changes to how the periscope works, more cosmetics, and a whole bunch of fixes to various systems (plus other stuff I'm probably forgetting).
Here's a little sneak peek of the key visual for the cave biome, from our very talented concept artist, Blook Mook:
The core theme of this biome is "light and dark". We try to balance each biome around a central threat, and here, that threat is always waiting to strike the moment you step out of the light. There's a variety of open and claustrophobic spaces, as well as smaller caves you can park your submarine in and go explore.
We expect to keep adding more obstacles and treasures to biomes as we go, as well as periodic balancing to keep things fun and fair :)
I also want to address some of the frequent feedback we've received:
"Why did I lose my treasure?"
We may not have been clear enough in the marketing, but this is an extraction-type game. That means dying in a run deletes your submarine and everything on it. We're currently working on systems and balancing to make this feel less punishing, but the goal is to add some tension to the dives and influence player decision-making. We're adding a screen when you lose a run to make this more obvious.
We're also designing more permanent, overarching progression systems for the future, but we have nothing concrete to talk about right now.
If you lost a submarine without losing a run, it would be great if you could give us more details about how exactly it happened :)
"The harpoon is stuck/broken/gone"
We've been fighting with this harpoon so much, you don't even know. We're doing an extra pass on it to make it client predicted but if you still experience issues in-game, we would be grateful if you could hop on our discord and give us a bit more information about how exactly it broke ^^;
"It is laggy"
Our game is currently not in a performance state we're happy with, and we will be addressing this before full release. If playing with friends, we highly recommend the player with the best computer host, as the host has to generate extra content in the way of navmeshes, spawns, and physics simulation. We're currently looking into issues with build sizes and lighting, but more hardcore optimization is a bit further out on the horizon.
"Let me date Zip"
We hear you - in the unlikely event that we make a dating sim spinoff, we'll make that happen ;)
I totally didn't make the last one up.
Finally, I would like to show you my favourite feedback comments so far:
Keep them coming! We read them all (even if we can't act on them all immediately)
Thanks for reading :D
- The What'Sub development team