[img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40466477/58c1d01d7d94901d9032a06564652ab0f243eb66.png[/img] [h1][u][b]An open and honest letter of where are things and where are they going[/b][/u] [/h1] It’s the 2 year anniversary of the Early Access Release of Rank: Warmaster. This letter is more a transparency of what is happening and what has happened. [b]Short Answer:[/b] We aren’t dead (mostly), and more updates will be coming just far less often than updates happened when they happened regularly. [b]Long Answer:[/b] [h2][u][b]The tragedies of the past year or so…[/b][/u] [/h2] As posted in previous updates, there has been a lot of personal tragedy during the development of this project. Of the two programmers who worked on this project, Matt unfortunately died. I am the lead dev, head programmer, and man of many hats running the studio. Matt had been a close personal friend for well over a decade, so his loss hit me hard, and obviously greatly hurt the progress of this project. After the dust settled from that, it was decided that my efforts might be better served to develop a smaller game, based in the same universe. The idea was that since Rank: Warmaster really didn’t gain the traction it needed because of it being our first commercial game, as well as not having the funding to advertise to a large enough audience to gain that traction, perhaps a less complicated game would gain the attention needed. So Rank Warmaster: Bunker Buster was born. It’s a tower defense game, using the same custom engine. Part of the idea was as things were updated and fixed, it would flow back into Rank: Warmaster. And that is what happened for quite a few months. You saw previous posts hinting at this new project. Since most of the things needed to create such a project was already in existence as part of the current engine and game, it was felt it would be a quick project. Unfortunately, as anyone knows in Game Dev, things rare work out as expected. Only a month into the development, my father was in a car accident, and while surviving that initial injury, he slowly deteriorated over the following months. I started to be responsible as power of attorney for his affairs before he passed, and then the executor of his estate after he passed. Between being the executor and issues with my son also being in the hospital for unrelated things, I just didn’t get anything done for about 5 months. I just couldn’t realistically, as much as I tried, to keep pace with the every two week release schedule that I had set for myself for Rank: Warmaster. There just wasn’t anything of substance to release so I stopped, as you might have noticed. [h2][u][b]Where things are going[/b][/u] [/h2] Things have finally settled down enough in the past month or so to get back to coding and Biz Dev and actually make progress. And I am, and I have a lot of progress on Bunker Buster. It will NOT be released into early access, since I don’t want to make that mistake again. It will be a 1.0 to show what can be done. All the things developed for Bunker Buster, if applicable, will be put in Rank: Warmaster. The hope is after Bunker Buster is finished, that work will more directly resume on Rank: Warmaster to do a 1.0 release and get it out of Early Access. In Effect, as a re-launch, hopefully. The good news is more experienced people have been getting involved with Bunker Buster, so it should be a far more polished product than Rank: Warmaster has been. With that experience the hope is to apply what was learned. I’m not going to set a release date for Bunker Buster but I do expect to have something for the public by first quarter next year. Considering it’s December, that isn’t too long. I do appreciate those that have stuck with the project through all of this, and it was very important to me that you knew Rank: Warmaster wasn’t abandoned. And you deserved to know why the updates stopped and what was happening. I do appreciate your understanding and patience. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422270/Rank_Warmaster/