First and foremost, please note that come March 31st we will be crowning the Early Access champions for both procedural and reality-based seeds. If you are the best player, this is the time to prove it.

In This Update

Visual Changes

There have been a variety of added visuals to the game. These range from different PC screens based on the type of work each worker is doing, to particle effects on all the player skills. There is also a new stage spotlight effect that highlights which worker is leading that stage for medium + sized games. All of these effects can be toggled off in the game options menu if you find they ruin immersion or you prefer no effects for performance reasons. These effects also act as player feedback in the sense that they provide a visual way to see when certain time-based skills are running and completed such as Crunch / Rush Work / Design and Tech Overrides.

There are more visual improvements and optimizations planned to come this month. It is a difficult and tedious task but all these small improvements add up to a much more polished and complete game.

Fixes

There were a few issues that have been found and fixed. I have to give a big shout out to Dycart Gaming for his amazing bug hunting work combined with twitch VODS. They have been a great asset for the game over the last 10 months of EA and they still continue to do so.

There was an issue with engine updating and then trying to make DLC for a game that used the pre updated engine. This would result is the game not finding the engine to list its features for the DLC due to the new 2.0 naming convention. This will now correctly find an updated engine for DLC creation.

There was a rather large issue with the new CPU screen system combined with doing both studio work and individual worker tasks at the same time that could miss match pointers ruining the training and research being done. This will now correctly work during any mix of studio work and worker tasks running. I am very confident this issue has been completely fixed, but of course if anyone notices any issues, please bring it to my attention and we will make short work of any problems.

What Is Next

For the rest of March, we have more visual updates and optimization changes coming. As previously stated, we will be crowing the champions of EA at the end of the month. I am very happy to say that we are on schedule to hit the June / 03 / 2022 release date exactly 1 year after we began EA. I have a large list of features, changes, and additions planned for the 1.0 release patch. This will be worked on over April / May leading to release. I am not going to get into the release patch specifics, but we can continue the conversation on Discord if you are interested.

For now, just know that the EA champions will be crowned soon, but the ladder will not be reset until release. Part of the 1.0 patch will be creating the champions page as well as the hall of fame entries so these will be recorded at the end of March 31. Thank you for all your support and feedback over the past 10 months. The finish line for the release is within sight, and the post release phase will soon begin.