Week 16: Vacation Over

Welcome to our first post-vacation weekly update!

For those new here, we post weekly updates with the goal of being completely transparent with our progress. Comments are open to everyone and we would love to hear your thoughts!

So What's New?

Usual tradition dictates that we start by covering our goals from last week, but this time there were none to report. That's because we were on a much needed vacation. ːsteamboredː

Instead, let's take a look at what we accomplished the week before:

Plans for Week 15

	Task	ETA
Steam post image	Create 3D models for: suv, minivan and bus	Week 15
Steam post image	Add the new vehicles to the game	Week 15

Table shows up-to-date progress along with ETA for active targets, if any.

As you can see, we finished the tasks we set out to do and we're right on track with the schedule.

More Details

Those of you who read the week 14 update may have been scratching your heads, wondering what happened to the week 15 update. We did promise to post this very update on time, after all.

Truth be told, I (project lead / developer) failed to plan the start of my vacation well enough and significantly misjudged my available time on the Monday of week 14.

So, What About Week 15?

In my previous post I only mentioned that we would be out of the office week 14. Well, I have another confession to make.

I have been working a second job in an attempt to fund the development of this game for the past few months. It has taken a bigger toll on me than I would have liked to admit to myself, my team and all of you.

As a result, we took an (unplanned) week of time away from development and instead focused on how we should proceed.

Going Forward

The situation is, as is, clearly untenable. As a result, we see only two possible options going forward:

1. Raise money externally

2. Reduce our costs

Raising money would require at least a one-month full-time focus on starting the campaign itself and more time still to keep it going. We feel that is too much time wasted, as we want to release the game to all of you as soon as possible.

We have also had a secret internal goal to enter Steam's Next Fest in October with a playable demo. It has yet to be set in stone, but we would like to try to stick to that. We will give more information once we have made a firm decision.

Reducing our costs is not any easier of a decision, but it is the one we chose. From now on until our early access release, we will not spend any more money on equipment or art assets.

Additionally, the full-time "team" will consist of only myself, with our amazing artist doing projects on-demand.

What Does This Mean?

As most art assets we need have already been made or purchased, the impact should be minimal. Development time may suffer, but not by much as I will have more energy to focus on bringing Team Ice Cream to you all!

In short, our aim is still early access release for fall 2022.

Plans for Week 16

Table shows next week's targets.

We will start the week by continuing to reorganize the schedule with our new skeleton crew in mind and then we can start getting some of the actual game content done, again!

That's it for this week!

Want to keep track of our progress? Check out this post on our Steam discussion forums, it has a lot more details on what we hope to accomplish and by when we hope to be done, including monthly targets!