Release Date: When it's Done

Welcome back! It is me again, the bearer of bad news. If you've been following our Discord you were probably expecting this announcement, but it's still taking us a bit longer to finish the game.

We wanted to give you a heads up of a concrete release date at least two months in advance, but as we are now within two months of the end of summer, it is clear that we can't make this current deadline.

Wait, what happened?

The good news is that nothing special happened. We haven't hit any new unsolvable technical issues, we haven't run out of personal funds, we haven't given up on the project, or anything like that.

The bad news is that it's just not done yet. We made the classic indie developer mistake of thinking the game would surely be done soon. There are mostly two reasons:

• We set the scope of the project way too big and underestimated how much work it would take to finish the remaining features we need for early access: scalable physics replication, vehicle building ux, wire logic, behaviors scripting, gallery integration and a general usability pass. However, we feel that all of these features are necessary for the game to realize its potential, and we don't want to compromise by giving you a worse game earlier.
• We really overestimated how much time and energy we would have to work on these things next to our day jobs and other things going on in life. Brickadia is not yet a funded studio, we are just a few people making this game on the side for fun. The thing is... spending 12 hours a day working on really cool projects sounds like a great fun idea at first, but it quickly turns out that it's not actually that fun after you've done it for a long time. We're now setting a new timeline accepting that we can't be voluntarily crunching every day.

Ok, but when will it be done?

I've just updated the release date on Steam to Q1 2024. I can't tell you at this moment whether the game will be done at that time, earlier, or later. But it feels reasonable given the circumstances. We will let you know of a concrete release date at least two months in advance, and continue posting updates on our blog as we finish major milestones.

So what's next from here?

We haven't posted on our blog in a while, so you're probably wondering what we've been up to. Don't worry, we're slowly chugging along. Besides tons of minor progress, some big things are happening:

For one, there has been significant progress on the Behaviors scripting system! We just watched it compile and execute the first ever in-game script earlier this week (without crashing!). There'll be a blog post on this as soon as we have the editor UI in a state where we can show it without having it look really clunky due to being unfinished in all the corners.

We're also making progress on the scalable physics replication and vehicle building now, and will have a first blog post on these experiments soon.

Beyond that, we're also making progress on our backend service to prepare it for hosting the gallery. We have a plan for how to host large amounts of custom content on it for very little cost and integrate it directly with the game, with new bundle formats for things such as prefabs, worlds, and future custom content.

Also, we rewrote the backend service in Rust. Like the entire thing. In hindsight, that one was probably dumb.

Thanks for your patience with us, I know you want to play this game as badly as we do. See you in the next blog post!