Hello everyone...today I wanted to talk a little bit about the latest update "Doorways". As you may know, "Doorways" was intended to be the final "big" update for VoltAge:Genesis, adding about twenty new quests and completing the storylines for several major characters as well as the main story itself. It was supposed to be released on April 5th 2020, marking a year since I officially released the game in its unfinished form. Since then, I've put out two other updates, roughly doubling the size of the game and making dozens of ease of life changes as well as fixing quite a few critical bugs. For someone with a full time job, in school, working on the game nights and weekends only, it has been a LOT of work. Objectively speaking, I know I should be proud of what I have done so far, but in truth I feel like I've failed due to the delays in pushing out this most recent update.

I started working in earnest over the holidays and I got a great deal of work done early on, but despite my plan for this to be a "pure" expansion, I found myself spending more and more time overhauling existing stuff (as you can see from the dev notes I've been posting). Even still, I was confident I would be able to complete my work by the planned release date.

However, with the challenges we have faced over the past few weeks, my life / work balance has fundamentally changed. Where before my full time job involved a great deal of personal interaction, teaching, and other varied activites, I have spent most of the last month working from home drafting letters and legal documents for 8-9 hours a day. I am not complaining about the fact that I have a job which has kept me employed through this pandemic, I am simply trying to point out how fundamentally my average day has changed.

It is much harder for me now to devote meaningful time to working on VoltAge:Genesis right now...after spending 8 hours a day staring at one computer screen, it is very hard to then swivel 90 degrees and stare at another one for the rest of the evening. It is not healthy, and it is certainly not productive. To be clear, I am NOT suspending development of the game and I am NOT "taking a hiatus" or whatever it is people say they are doing. I am simply stating that for the time being, I do not want to put a timer on when the next update will come out, other than to say that I intend for everything to be done by the end of this year. While it is not "finished", per se, there are dozens of challenging bosses, over a hundred quests to complete, and TONS of things to do and places to explore...the story isn't done yet, but there's already a lot there to enjoy :)

By way of apology for this disappointing turn of events, I will be discounting the full version of VoltAge:Genesis by 50% for the next month and adding an additional limited edition accessory to the game for anyone who plays either the free demo or the full version before the Version 5 update comes out later this year. 

Thanks as always for reading, and stay safe out there...the Deadlands are a dangerous place.

-Zach