Attention Officers,
Welcome to the 76th edition of our Ready or Not Development Briefing, August 2nd, 2024!
This week we want to provide a hopeful retrospective from our Game Director, Gruntr, regarding the recent release of our first DLC, Home Invasion. The message also serves as a general reflection that will help you understand our current experience as a game development studio.
Thank you for all of your feedback and continued support for the game as we look to support the game to the best of our abilities.
We’re eager to deliver you all more Ready or Not content, growing together throughout the process. Speaking of which, Patch 2 for Home Invasion is on its way shortly.
Note: These development briefings serve to keep you in the loop about parts of our ongoing support for Ready or Not, however the briefings do not encompass everything that we’re working on at a given moment. Please keep in mind that the content in our development briefings may still be a work in progress and subject to change.
Hey everyone, thanks for reading this dev briefing, I'd love to share a bit of reflection and insight as the Game Director for Ready or Not:
It's been one hell of a wild ride, from RoN’s early inception and private alpha, "that" PVP event during the pandemic, releasing the game in Early Access to massive acclaim, and dropping 1.0 with a big marketing push that saw our game across billboards in downtown Los Angeles.
Underlying all of this is hundreds upon thousands of collective hours of learning how to work together as a larger team, continue to grow a game studio at a healthy pace for the product, company, and people; improve RoN, and release content on a reasonable schedule. This progression internally has allowed us to hone our skills as a team and improve Ready or Not.
While DLC 1 came with a myriad of QoL improvements, a player-friendly approach to DLC, fresh content, cosmetics, and more ― it was (reasonably) received with dismay namely due to the unintentionally poor system performance and limited access to new DLC maps, among other concerns.
Regarding the DLC maps, I want to establish that the decision was made initially to not release the DLC in Commander Mode months ago. Collectively, we didn't properly consider the ramifications of this decision, and it has become an extremely valuable lesson.
Regardless, just like any good company should, we're working on improving our processes while also creating a better line of communication with everyone who follows Ready Or Not. Patch 2 will see access to the new DLC maps through Commander Mode for those who have completed all 1.0 levels, as well as even further improvements to performance and bugfixes.
The start of this year saw our team reconvene slowly due to the sheer intensity of 2023 -- we all ended up all working extremely long hours to get the release out the door at the end of the year, and as a result we paid the price with a slow but necessary recovery from burnout in the first quarter of 2024.
However, even through all this our team managed to continue work on the DLC 1 (and DLC 2) maps, plan future content, improve the game repository (cleaning up 7-odd years of unused content within the editor), dealt with a partial leak alert, and switched to Unreal 5 so that we could continue to reap the benefits from engine upgrades well into the future.
With of this being said, thank you all for your feedback on our latest release: positive, negative, and anywhere in between.
We don't want anything to stop us from continuing to work on the game many of you have sunk hundreds of hours into, and we have big plans for DLC 2 and beyond; I'm personally super excited to get into those plans internally this coming week― we've got some cool stuff in store.
Thanks again,
Gruntr
COO/Game Director
Conclusion
As we continue to work on fixes and improvements for the game and initiate our next phases of planning, know that we are thinking of our community and how we can best strive to meet your expectations. We’re sorry for any shortcomings that can occur, and we work to improve wherever possible.
This concludes our 76th development briefing, thank you again for joining us. Be sure to fall in next time for more development news!
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