April ’24 Update

Hey guys,

It’s time for an update on the game, where it’s currently at and how we’re going to proceed from here. If you followed our previous posts you’ll know that after the issues we’ve had with Unity DOTS, we decided to switch engines in order to fix the instability and constant crashes DOTS was causing. While the port is largely finished now, because of how fundamentally different DOTS is to normal programming paradigms we essentially had to rewrite the entire game from scratch.

Reproducing over a year’s worth of work in less than half the time is a pretty big thing to ask for, but the fact we managed to do it (and while maintaining higher levels of quality/stability to boot) is a good sign that ditching DOTS was the right choice to make. While the rate of progress is much faster, it still took us a considerable amount of time, meaning we didn’t have any time left to work on new major features as compared to the demo.

Our original plan was to port over the demo features and release it with some minor additions, along with the added polish and improved stability of no longer relying on DOTS. This would have made for a very rudimentary initial build with very little content, which would have felt very underwhelming for a lot of players when it first dropped.

That’s why over the past month we’ve put some work in behind the scenes to secure an additional round of funding. We’re still ironing out the details, but as of right now development funds have been secured for at least another year. Instead of being forced to rush out a sub-par version for lack of money, we’ll be able to take this time to make sure the first launch is a success.

What’s next

Since we’re no longer putting all of our resources towards recreating what we had before, and we’re largely done with the basic engine architecture, going forward we’ll be able to concentrate on implementing some of the major features we have planned for the game. You can expect more dev logs with updates coming soon as a result.

While we think getting the extra dev time for a fleshed out release is necessary and will benefit the game in the long run, we also understand that many of you were pretty excited to finally get to play it in April. We’re already working on some ideas for how to alleviate that, but the details depend on how certain things shape up within the next few weeks. We’ll announce specifics as soon as we can on that front.

We hope that despite the delay, you’ll understand why we chose to do things this way. After all, quality can’t be rushed and you only get to make first impressions once. That’s why we want to make sure when you first get to play AoA, your experience will be a good one. Stay tuned for more progress updates soon.

Until then, stay safe and keep surviving!