Dev Blog #4 - Catching Up On Time
Hello again, everyone! We know it's been longer than we anticipated since our last blog, and we wanted to write this one to clear the air on what's been going on from then to now. We want to be clear before diving into this blog that Dark Rising is not cancelled, and we have no plans to cancel it. However, due to financial reasons, we have decided to shift our focus to other projects to help bring more funding back towards our studio.
Why not just continue Dark Rising?
When we first began developing Dark Rising, our goal from the very start was clear, we want to create an asymmetric horror game built out of passion for the genre, and to deliver on a level of quality that hasn't been seen before in this style of game. We want to bring an experience that is our ideal image for an asymmetric game, and not water down any aspect in an attempt to appeal to a different kind of audience.
Dark Rising was never built with the intent of being very popular or a massively profitable game. Unfortunately, this means when we need to bring more revenue to our studio, DR becomes one of the first projects to put on the shelf.
The reality is that we are a small team doing this full-time, and tough decisions have to be made for the long-term future of our studio. Up until our last blog, Dark Rising has been one of our main projects for just shy of a year. We have invested thousands of hours ontop of tens of thousands of dollars towards development.
As development has taken longer than we anticipated (particularly due to our major refactor mentioned in the previous blog) we have decided to take a break from the project to focus on improving our other revenue streams, and ensure a more stable future for ourselves along with our projects (including DR).
Below is a brief dive into what we've been focusing on over recent times, and a look at our plans going forward.
Developer Training & New Content
As mentioned previously, we have been spending time continuing to train one of our developers on creating content for our previously released games. This reached a milestone in the release of 'The Mines' map for Cart Ride Delivery Service.
The release of this map was received very positively and we are already moving into developing the next map, which we are hoping to see released in the near future!
New Game in Development
In addition to this, we have also begun development on a new project as of a couple months ago. This is something we have prototyped in the past, but never showed off publicly.
Since this game is still early in development, we are not ready to show it off quite yet. What we can confirm is that this is a new co-op horror game where you must work together with friends to survive and progress through an unforgiving atmosphere.
This new project also utilizes the same framework along with some of the same tech we've developed for Dark Rising. While this is a different game with a bit of a smaller scope, we are still aiming for a level of quality much greater than anything we've accomplished before.
We are very excited to show more once we're ready.
Website & Backend Changes
Lastly, we have also been taking time to optimize and rearrange our backend services. As a result, we have improved the load times for content on our website, as well as cut costs across our servers. These changes will help us in the long-term and allow us to better utilize our backend capabilities.
Conclusion
We know this isn't like our usual blogs, and we apologize that we don't have new exciting content to show off from Dark Rising, but we hope you all understand our reasoning for shifting our focus. We want to be here for a long time, and as tough as it is to momentarily shift focus away from DR, it is important for the longevity of Bitware Games as a whole.
We look forward to returning in our next blog where we'll hopefully be sharing more details on what's to come. In the meantime, we hope you all take care!