The Road to 1.0

It's been way too long since our last update on Drift. What started as the Space Exploration update has evolved into something much bigger - the 1.0 update.

As I mentioned before, some early design decisions (mainly the static ship in an infinite field) increasingly limited what we could add and frustrated players trying to find resources. I realized we couldn't fix this with small incremental updates, we needed to rebuild the core loop from the ground up.

One goal I had was to make sure the next update gave you more hours of gameplay than before, while still improving the game. Turns out that was a much bigger task than I imagined.

The good news? While our tech team was helping out on an exciting update for another game, our content team expanded significantly. We started with just myself, one artist, and a sound designer (plus our amazing composer). Now we've added a dedicated animator, VFX artist, two level designers, and two additional programmers.

I don't have any official dates to announce today, but I wanted to show you some of the regions you'll be exploring.

An abandoned ship from a previous exploration team offers rare resources, but you'll need to be careful of radiation leaks.

This abandoned automated race platform has critical technology to upgrade your ship, locked away in the winner's platform.

Alien Ruins are everywhere, leaving behind treasure and risk.

Asteroid Caves are more alive than ever, but avoid acidic flora until you're ready.

Automated resource gathering is more important than ever. Some later game resources like titanium can only be mined with advanced drills.

That's all for today - I know this has been long wait with more to come, but this is what we're pouring our energy into every day. We'll get it in your hands as soon as it's ready.

-Chris