Greetings Spacefarers!
The holidays are now behind us, and the team is back to work! We’re incredibly excited for the direction the game and our team are taking going into 2023. Our first step is to continue to sift through the bug reports, feedback, and input from the community from the alpha. There is a lot to look through, and we appreciate all of the contributions and constructive feedback everyone put in over the course of the playtest. This will all be invaluable as we get back into the swing of things and continue to smooth out the gameplay experience, as well as layering in the additional content coming for beta.
On the development side, we’re diving into our beginning of the year planning, and sitting down to review the roadmap in light of our learnings from alpha. We’ve expanded the Echoes team even further, allowing us to go full steam ahead on the development of the game more than ever before. This does mean some internal onboarding and getting our team oriented, so January will be a little more quiet with everyone heads down on the project and finding their groove. Work will be underway on combat, economy, and many other core features as we tie down our goals for beta later this year. Expect plenty of information, leeks, and news as we go along!
One of our earlier goals this year will be to complete and distribute the litepaper for the project. This was something we promised to deliver, and are looking forward to making it available. We know that the community values transparency, and we will continue to be as open and straightforward with the game’s development as we have been since the beginning. While we feel that the alpha test was a strong demonstration of “walking the walk” rather than just sharing insight, the litepaper will still be an excellent source of truth for the community.
On the community side, we’ll be rounding out our ship lore series this month, covering the Arbeiters vessels and the stories behind them. It’s been a lot of fun sharing these stories with you, and giving more insight into the place these different ships hold in the Echoes universe. We’ll also be sharing in depth blogs on features in progress as well, highlighting some of the work going on behind the scenes beyond our monthly dev update. There won’t be a set cadence to these additional pieces, as they’ll be articles that we bring out as we work on interesting parts of the game.
Stay tuned for more news and updates in the coming weeks!