Tuesday 4 August 2020

Blightbound OUT NOW! Early Access on Steam!

Last Wednesday our new game Blightbound launched on Steam in Early Access! This is a super exciting moment as this is our first new IP to release in 8 years. We've been developing Blightbound for nearly 3 years now and it's really special to finally have the game live and see the community play it! Here's our launch trailer:



We have big plans for this game in Early Access. As the roadmap shows we have a ton of things in development to improve and expand the game. Since this is an Early Access release, there are plenty of fixes and improvements to be made to the game and the first two hotfixes have already released.

Through many years of expanding Awesomenauts we've gained a lot of experience running a live game and responding to the community and we plan on applying all of those lessons here. Robin and I did a talk on Games As A Service a few years back at Steam Dev Days and it's fun to be able to get back to that.

For example, during the first period of Awesomenauts live-ops we didn't really brand our patches and didn't distinguish between fixes and content drops. Here we're doing that right away: hotfixes happen in between and don't contain new content, while major updates get a name and branding and a strong dosis of new stuff to keep players interested and bring players back who had seen it all already. Updates will even come with their own accompanying short stories, written by Roderick Leeuwenhart. The launch story, named "Forging Ahead", is already live on our website and more will follow in the coming period.

Now that the game is out there, I'm also able to write more about it. In the coming period I hope to find the time to talk about how things were built, since there are tons of interesting topics to discuss! We've even already encountered our first set of blog-worthy networking bugs, so I think I'll start there in my next blogpost.

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