Making this news post doesn’t come easy, as undoubtedly some people will be upset, but I think being honest and transparent is the right way to go about it.
Over the past couple of months, during development of our next major update, Simulator, we saw an opportunity to improve upon various small things in the game, beyond the scope of what was originally planned. This includes things such as the expanded brake simulation, better inventory system, water physics, a massive game manual and many others, which weren’t initially considered for this update, but do shape the overall quality impression of the game.
We chose to do this now because doing these improvements on the fly, along with other changes necessitated by Simulator, showed to be much faster than coming back to them in the future. There’s also a high quality bar that we need to meet, and we can clearly see that community expectations for the update are higher today than when it was announced last year, especially with the large influx of new players as of late.
The scope expansion did bring the risk of not meeting the March release date, but ultimately, we did it to make Derail Valley a better game. At this point we can see that we won’t make it till March without rushing, and have decided to postpone the release instead.
Despite the postponement, development is progressing very well. The team is bigger and more productive than ever, and we’re already close to a feature freeze, with the added quality improvements. The reason for the postponement is simply - we are tight with time to tidy things up and don’t want to rush the finishing stage. Even after development is done, there are activities that need to fall into place, such as translating, creating press material and other. We want to have enough time to properly deal with everything, instead of rushing like we had to do with every former major release.
We know many of you would like us to release smaller updates more frequently, or at least write a monthly developer journal, to ease the wait and make it shown how much work is really being put in. Unfortunately, neither would help with getting things done faster. On the contrary, both would add significant friction to our decision making. Smaller updates aren’t feasible when doing core rewrites of the game, and developer journals lead to premature or too high expectations from the community. We’ve done both, so this is talking from experience.
We do however actively answer questions on our Discord, and with it being a more real-time based platform with less eyes pointed at any particular chat message, I do tend to reveal more information about our plans and ongoings there, rather than here on Steam and other social media. Ironically, our community member SmashedFinger just compiled some of the quotes from Discord into two lists, Unlocks and Future Plans, and they are actually quite a good overview of minor bits of information, for anyone interested.
With that said, for now, we can just ask for more patience. Derail Valley is in Early Access after all, and its development path is always evolving. We, too, are super eager to finally reveal Simulator - when it's done.
If you’re wondering about what’s coming in Simulator and after it, please see our previous post. When we're absolutely sure the update is ready to be further revealed, we will come out with new screenshots, a trailer and the definitive release date. It will take at least several more months to get to that point.
Those of you who may be interested in helping us community-translate Derail Valley from English to virtually any other language, and would have time to do so, please let us know on Discord, Steam forums or email (hello@altfuture.gg). Soon we’ll organize a translator contest, and the best candidate(s) per language will be given access to Simulator beta. Many candidates contacted us already, and we're looking forward to seeing various new languages come alive in Derail Valley! We will have more information about the translator contest soon.
At the end I'd like to thank you all for the understanding, support and feedback, over the years. It motivates us greatly to do more, and better.
-Slobodan
