Finnish survivashooter Road to Vostok has fared very well since wandering out of the early access gates last week, and its solo developer Antti Leinonen’s now turning his thoughts towards how he’ll build on that going forwards. However, he’s keen not to rush into any fixes or work on overhauls/additions, instead taking some time to get back to 100% following what sounds like an intense push to this initial build.
While Leinonen wrote in a Steam post over the weekend that he’s “already tempted” to start fixing and tweaking, but he’s resisting that urge due to past experience. “Getting to this early access required pretty insane work hours and stuff that I would not recommend for others, but I made those decisions since I wanted to give this product the best change for the launch and I hope the effort shows in the game,” he wrote. “And how is this related to hotfixes? Well, based on my prior experience if you start making tweaks and especially code-changes under this heavy-load, you can easily fix one thing, but you accidentally create two new problems or some unexpected issues when you are not running on 100% mental clarity.
“Since the game is performing really well on Steam and works like intended for [the] majority of the players, I really don’t want to screw things up by making accidental mistakes. I have decided that I will have this initial personal recovery first and only after that I will jump back into the code. I think this is the most reasonable and wise thing to do.”
The developer reckons it’ll take another week for him to be ready to start dishing out hotfixes, with that time giving him a chance to sift through an inbox that he says is overflowing with around 11,000 emails he’s not had a chance to look at yet. Then, once the initial hotfixes are out, Leinonen plans to take a “proper break” from development, something he says he’s not had in the past four years, starting work on second build, which’ll include an AI overhaul and some other “major additions”.
Road to Vostok’s website currently lists this second build as aiming for release sometime between that start of July and the end of September this year – Q3 in corpospeak. Dubbed Nomads, it’ll add a new map, shelter, and a friendly faction. A “Driver (Trader)”‘s also planned, which I assume is a bloke who sells stuff out of the boot of his motor. Finally, the aforementioned AI overhaul will allow NPCs to fight each other and add new “variants” of AI, which I assume means more variety in behaviours.
