A few months back we realized that Space Engineers had already almost all of the core features we originally planned to implement and that now would be a good time to start adding game scenarios -- something that will give players goals to achieve; something that will make Space Engineers more of a game and not just a creative sandbox.
We think that the best way to accomplish this is to create a set of interactive scenarios (levels, missions, etc.). We knew we couldn't do this alongside our other priorities, so we decided to start looking for people whose only job would be designing, prototyping and testing these scenarios.
We decided to hire level designers.
For these reasons, we launched a creation contest (where you can win NVIDIA graphic cards) and a job ad for level designers. Anyone can apply but relocation to Prague is required. I hope we will find some great new colleagues who will help us add new scenarios to Space Engineers.
The creation contest has another benefit for Space Engineers as well - if enough people apply, we will get a lot of material and ideas to choose from when implementing official scenarios in Space Engineers.
The second thing I wanted to talk about is that we started to reduce the amount of new features and now we are more focused on bug fixing and stabilization of things that are already in the game.
This doesn't mean we have reached BETA or anything like that. It only means that there's plenty of development time in front of us and it’s better for the community that the game be in a more stable state while we keep developing it.
The first stage of this stabilization period starts now and it means that we will split our focus 50/50 between new features and bug fixing. After a few weeks, once all work-in-progress features are implemented, we will focus 100% on bug fixing. This will be a feature freeze phase when we won’t add any new feature. This will allow us to focus only on bug fixing, testing and scooping forums for bug reports. We don’t plan to include any special performance optimizations in this stage (because that could lead to new bugs), except performance issues that happen due to bugs.
Thank you for reading this.
