Q2 Progression Update 2

Road to Early Access

Hi, here's a second part of this Q2 update.

Since the last update post, a lot of things has happen and my development focus has totally shifted from individual early access features to map building. When it comes to these individual early access features, I think the game has now a solid feature set that produces enough replayability and this commercial branch of RtV is in many ways a totally different game (in a good way) when compared to the existing Steam demo.

Before talking about the map building process, I want to highlight that my goal is to get this commercial branch as fast as possible to so called "feature lock" state. Feature lock in this context means that no more major code-based features are added to the game until early access release and only small changes / tweaks are allowed.

The purpose of this feature lock is to make sure I will have enough time for polishing and bug fixing since this commercial branch has a lot of new systems that needs to be tested in a proper gameplay context compared to development environments where I created them. I'm quite confident that I achieve this feature lock state somewhere around August and then I just have to worry about the maps.

Then let's talk about that map building which is the main variable at the moment when calculating the early access launch timelines. This topic is also highly related to 4x playable area (per map) decision which was made few month ago.

Currently, I'm building the second early access map called School (~75% done) and in-general I feel quite "comfortable" with this early access map building speed and tools that I've built to support this 4x playable area. I think the current map building speed is on average around one new map per month.

Since this map topic is the only remaining obstacle for the early access, I have also put quite a lot consideration towards what's the "minimum viable" product for the early access.

Here's my current idea of that "minimum viable" product (in terms of maps):
- Village (Area 05)
- Island (Area 05)
- Highway (Area 05)
- School (Area 05)
- Outpost (Area 05)
- Border Zone (details below)
- Apartments (Vostok)
- Radar (Vostok)

The roadmap in the website has few more maps listed and is bit more "idealistic plan" but when it comes to this "dangerous journey" ideology which is a must-have for the early access, I think something like this could also work if I don't manage to create all those extra maps on top of this.

The way how I'm going to make this "dangerous journey" ideology work is to create this "horizontal funnel" where the "world depth" from starting Area 05 map to the last Vostok map is around six maps deep. This six map funnel idea with the 4x playable area (per map) is going to provide ~2.4km in-game travel distance and compared to the demo where this "world depth" was only ~800m, it's a major increase.

This might be a bit hard to explain in a text form but this funnel would work something like this:
Village -> Highway or School -> Outpost -> Border Zone -> Apartments -> Radar

In order to create a bit more options to these routes I'm also going to utilize that Island map and water areas that require boats in a way that's going to be connected to the Border Zone directly.

In terms of Border Zone where the main idea is related to these multiple crossing points with different game mechanics, I'm currently testing an approach where I have one large "vertical line" map that represent the Border Zone and this map has multiple different crossing points directly inside of it.

Based on my initial tests, this new Border Zone approach seems to be much more clever development wise and it also allows me to have all kinds of different crossing point mechanics already in the early access since I don't have to worry about making separate crossing point maps. I will share more details about this Border Zone 2.0 idea in upcoming months.

ps. At the end of this week, I will showcase more screenshots of the School map which has now mostly ready exterior areas. In order to add few more IRL details to this map, I'm actually traveling today to that IRL locations to capture few more photo textures and covering few areas that I missed in my previous visit.

-Antti (Developer)