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Friday, December 25, 2015

Development status

Hi Guys,

With the coming holidays, I thought I'd give you an update on the state of the game and the reason behind the delays.

For the TL;DR people: mainly funding problems. For the rest of you, keep on reading.

AC-130 GS:SOS is a project that was funded with my own -very limited- life savings after coming out of a somehow nasty personal situation. I expected the project to take somewhere around 6 to 8 months working full-time, which meant available funds where just enough to scrape by till the end of the project.
 

Both fortunately and unfortunately, the project grew in a way that I hadn't planned. I didn't want to have mindless bots just moving aimlessly around a map waiting to be killed - I wanted a smart AI that would react realistically to a living battlefield. I wanted them to fight each other, have real missions, a purpose. I wanted vehicles that would use their full capabilities, both in attack and evasion. I wanted injuries and bleeding. I wanted a realistic damage model that would disable vehicle parts independently instead of "this tank can take 5 shots before exploding in a generic way". I wanted a crew that would analyze and make fitting comments about the situation developing underneath.
 

And that all takes additional time. Time means food and rent, and those two mean funding.
 

Normally, developers turn to Crowdfunding once they see funds are not enough to realistically finish a project. Unfortunately I did not have that luxury: in my country, operations in foreign currency were forbidden, and even if they hadn’t, taxes and transfer fees would’ve eaten almost all of the funds, if not more than what was actually collected. To overcome that barrier, developers in my country actually set up their companies abroad, but in my case, I just didn’t have the money to pay for the process.
 

Come June this year -10 months into the project- the funding situation was dire, to the point that even if the game had been completed right then and there, I wouldn’t have had enough funds to set up the structure necessary to post it on an app market and start generating revenue.
 

Therefore, I had no choice but to look for ways to make a living that would allow me to keep working on the game at least part-time, which meant that in the last 5 months, the project hardly advanced as I concentrated on that.
 

Nowadays, while still in hot waters, the situation is a lot more stable, which means I can –slowly- keep working toward a finished game.
As it is, the game is currently about 70% finished, with a pretty clear roadmap encompassing all remaining requirements.


I want to both thank and apologize to all those who’ve been eagerly awaiting this game, and wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, hoping that in the next one I finally get to reward you with a finished and entertaining game.

Diego Wasser
Owner/Developer, Byte Conveyor Studios

1 comment:

  1. Dear Diego Wasser,

    After much publicity by Russian MOD, you MUST finish the game.
    I mean why not? Everybody and his mother now knows that the game is awesome and realistic enough to fool even Russian military!

    ReplyDelete