Public Devlog #13: Gold Milestone and Launch Window

Hello once again everyone, and welcome to this very special development update!

Last update we outlined how the project had shaped up during Beta. This week we'll be talking about our final Milestone coming up in the next few months, the Gold Milestone. We'd also like to spend a bit of time talking about our plans for Marketing, and the final launch window for Project Regolith. So without further ado, let's get right down to it...

The Gold Milestone

As our final production milestone leading up to launch, our approach to Gold can be summed up broadly by the phrase "Get the game finished", but of course, there's a lot of work that's going to go into it, so let's talk details:

Puzzles and Environments - It should come as no surprise that making sure all our environments are up-to-scratch in our main puzzle areas is a top priority for the team. While we mentioned last update that all our puzzles are in a playable state in a vacuum, there's still a ways to go in terms of environmental storytelling and environmental cues that help provide context or hints to certain puzzles narrative-wise. And that will be a major part of our focus throughout Gold.

Narrative - Somewhat tying in to environmental work is our Narrative elements. As we've made a point of discussing in our updates, we've got a whole slew of Voice Actors whose work we've been receiving, reviewing, and preparing to implement into the game. The crew members of Outpost Rhea have their voices, and making sure they're heard in the right place and at the right time is something we're talking about. You'll also be able to revisit logs you've previously found, review transcripts, and read additional lore entries in our in-game Codex!

Polish and Testing - I mentioned in our last update that external testing wasn't something we'd had much time for during Beta, and we're definitely aiming to remedy that as we push through the next few months. We're currently planning out when, where, and how we intend to get the game tested, and we'll hopefully talk a bit more about it in a future post.

Once we've got some solid, actionable data from our testers, we'll get to work on sanding down rough edges, fixing as many bugs as we can leading to launch, and overall making the game experience better!

Marketing

As you might've guessed, marketing an Indie title is no small feat. We've been steadily growing our following on social media the past few months, but not at a pace we're particularly pleased with. Unfortunately, being a small team of 4 limits the amount of time we can spend engaging on Socials without taking time away from the actual production. We've been looking into other means of promotion for Project Regolith, and we've come up with a few ideas:

Social Media Goals/Calls to Action - To try help drive engagement on our socials we've started setting incremental goals for each avenue. The first of which has been our effort to hit 200 Followers on our Twitter with a payoff of unlocking the 2nd Track from our OST (speaking of which, don't forget to check out the teaser below and subscribe to our YouTube!)

Upcoming Events - Some of you may remember seeing us at PAX Australia 2022 last year, and showcasing our progress again this year is definitely something we want to leave on the table. Not only that, but we've also been considering South By Southwest Sydney (SXSW) as a candidate for promoting Project Regolith here in Australia. While nothing's set in stone just yet, we'll be sure to keep you all posted on events we'll be attending!

The Steam Next-Fest (October 2023 Edition) - If you've been on Steam the past couple of weeks you no doubt noticed the June edition of the Steam Next-Fest, a showcase of upcoming Indie titles, livestreams, and playable Demos. This October the Next-Fest is returning once again, and we're intending to participate with Project Regolith, and a refurbished/relaunched version of our Hydroponics demo, with all of it's final assets in place.

Unfortunately, this has fairly important implications on our launch window, as titles that participate in the Next-Fest can't be already released.

Launch Window

So what does this mean for launch? Well, ultimately we're aiming to keep our deadlines the same, with the game being done by late-August, and leaving us with some wiggle-room for all the things we've outlined above. But in order to participate, we'll have to push back our planned launch-window by a little bit.

After a lengthy discussion amongst the team, we've decided that it would be silly to pass up an opportunity to help push the game to as many eyes as possible leading up to launch, and we've decided that this small delay is necessary. (It also moves us away from the launch windows of some much larger AAA Sci-Fi titles in late August/early September)

For this delay, we'd like to apologize. We hope you all understand the reasoning behind our decision. But we'd like to officially declare...

Project Regolith will release this October, following the conclusion of the Steam Next-Fest!

We'll leave you with that exciting bit of news for this week's update. Stay tuned for more information over the next few weeks!

• Ryan

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