Red Rust Pioneers - Development Update #9

Howdy, Pioneers,

This is a special one.

One year ago today, we launched the Red Rust Pioneers store page and shared our announcement trailer with the world. We had an idea for a game we believed in, a small team with a lot of ambition, and absolutely no idea how many of you would want to come along for the ride.

It turns out, quite a few of you did.

To every one of you who has wishlisted the game, joined our Discord, voted in our polls, shared your thoughts and your excitement; thank you. Your support over this past year has meant more to us than we can properly put into words. This is a game we're building for you, and we mean that. The conversations we have with you, particularly those of you in our Discord community, genuinely shape the direction of development. When you tell us what matters to you, we listen. You'll see proof of that in this very update.

So, to mark the occasion, we've been saving up. There's been a lot happening behind the scenes at Rusty Robot over the past few months, and we're finally ready to show you some of it. This is a big update, so pour a coffee, settle yourself by the campfire, and let's get into it.

A New Way to See the Frontier

To celebrate one year of Red Rust Pioneers, we've released a brand new teaser trailer. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch it now. We'll wait.

We've also refreshed the screenshots on our store page to better reflect where the game is today. If you visited the page when we first launched it a year ago, it's worth another look. A lot has changed.

Backed by the UK Games Fund

We're incredibly proud to share some news that has made a real difference to what we're able to achieve with Red Rust Pioneers.

Earlier this year, Rusty Robot was awarded a Content Grant by the UK Games Fund. This funding has allowed us to expand our development team, bringing in additional talent to help us deliver the game we know our community is waiting for.

The UK Games Fund supports studios whose projects demonstrate quality, ambition, and potential. Their team reviewed Red Rust Pioneers, assessed what we're building, and chose to back us. That support has been invaluable, and we want to thank the UK Games Fund for believing in what we're trying to create.

The grant is helping us to do more of what we're already doing; build a deep, authentic, immersive frontier survival experience, but do it better and faster than we could on our own. More hands on deck means more features, more polish, and a better game for you.

We don't take that kind of support lightly, and we intend to make the most of it.

Building a Pioneer: The Character Journey

From the very beginning, we knew that Red Rust Pioneers needed characters that felt real. Not just functional models wearing frontier clothes, but people with faces you'd remember. Pioneers who look like they've lived a life before they ever set foot on the trail.

When we first started building the game, we used off-the-shelf character assets to get things moving. They did the job for prototyping, but they never felt like our pioneers. They were placeholders, and we always knew we'd need to do better.

Left: original character model, Right: latest character model

The first step in that journey was an experiment. Some of you might remember Red, our campfire storyteller