It’s amazing to think that the first TerraTech prototype was created almost three years ago, and the game has been in active development for nearly two years now! We are incredibly proud of how far we have come in that time, and even more proud of our wonderful community, who have embraced and supported our development approach.
When we launched our Kickstarter last year, we had to set dates for delivery of the ‘finished’ game and various rewards. We set April 2014 as the target, though we hoped (and still hope) the game would remain live and growing for a long time after.
TerraTech is a living project, which evolves with community activity and feedback. Naturally this means things don’t always go according to plan! We also had to contend with challenges like growing our team, which took a lot longer than we hoped to reach full strength. As a result, it took until February to enter Early Access on Steam, and we now believe the game will be not ready to leave Early Access this year.
Of course, lots of projects suffer schedule slip, and although our community has been consistently supportive, we didn’t want to be one of “those” projects that leave their backers feeling disappointed when the end result takes extra time to deliver. That’s why, if we have to re-evaluate the schedule, we always look for ways to stay true to the spirit of our original pledges. For instance, when we delayed the original “1.0″ date from April, we offered all our backers a Steam key, so they wouldn’t have to wait to play the game.
Now we’re looking at the schedule again, and we remain fully committed to everything we talked about in our “Road to 1.0″ blog, but we feel it doesn’t make sense to attach an arbitrary deadline to this. The Early Access approach has worked really well, both for us and our player community, so we think it’s best to continue this model, and focus on doing justice to each new feature rather than rushing them out.
This means we will remain in Early Access for a while longer, so again we want to make sure no-one loses out, by having to wait to get something they were expecting at a certain time. In particular, this affects some of the original Kickstarter rewards that were tied to final release – we’re now looking at delivering these rewards early, so we’ve put together a quick survey for Kickstarter backers, to get input on when and how you would like to receive these rewards.
If you backed for at least £40 ($60) then please complete THIS survey. There are also some questions in there for non-backers – for example, some people have asked us about the possibility of selling ‘slacker backer’ rewards similar to the original Kickstarter ones – so please tell us what you think.
We would like to extend a massive thank-you to everyone, for your tireless support and enthusiasm for TerraTech and the Payload team! We feel immensely privileged to have such an amazing community, and we continue to work as hard as we can to make this game awesome for you.
with love,
Payload Studios
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