Schedule Update
Welcome honored Captains, Backers, and friends to the latest Kickstarter update with current progress, current schedule, and a few other announcements.
First of all, we recently passed the one year anniversary of the Star Traders 2 Kickstarter. While we have made a great deal of progress on the project, we are obviously behind schedule. We launched the KickStarter with a rough estimate of shipping the game in Q4 of 2015 and that no longer seems realistic.
We started Star Traders 2 with only the vision that we shared with you on KickStarter. Over the past year we have refined that vision into a completed game design, engineered tech demos, and selected and improved our game engine's major components in preparation for the tasks ahead. These steps have taken longer than we originally planned.
As a team of two, we have a limited number of staff to assign to each task. Both of us have experienced personal challenges this year, with moving across the country being at the top of the list. Our goal remains to deliver on the vision of Star Traders 2, no matter what. We want to thank everyone for their patience and we can’t wait to see what is ahead for this game.
As you have seen in the past few updates, we have moved past the design and prototyping phase and are now driving towards playable components. Our team is growing and we are expanding our talent pool as we ramp up into the production cycle for Star Traders 2. If you’ve played any of our other games, you know we’ve leveled up our animation, sound effect and music composition process -- a necessary step for us to deliver the rich and immersive gameplay we want for ST2.
A CNNMoney examination of the top 50 most-funded projects on Kickstarter found that 84% missed their target delivery dates and we have, with much shame, joined those ranks. Our current estimates put us roughly 6 to 7 months behind schedule. Our original ship date was winter of 2015 and we are now projecting summer of 2016.
We may be behind schedule but the scope and mission of the project have not changed. We are 100% dedicated to delivering this game with all the bells and whistles.
This week we have finished revising and updating our project plan. As you have seen in the previous updates, we have adjusted our plan to help mitigate the schedule changes. To get started on the alpha test as early as possible, we will release finished parts of the game as stand-alone alpha-test prototypes. This will mean that the alpha test will not be delayed as much, and we’ll be able to collect valuable feedback from our Backers earlier. The first of these components will be the character creation module.
Thank you for your continued support,
Cory and Andrew Trese
Trese Brothers Games
