I know there’s frustration about our delays releasing new video from the game, and you deserve an explanation.
I’ve guided many dozens of games through development across the past 30+ years. Normally, we would carve out a map for capturing marketing video, screenshots, and demos and then polish this one map. But, we can’t do this with Six Days because the entire game is a procedurally generated simulation. Every mission is made of components, and these components interact with each other, so creating a video is never a matter of just polishing a few things on a map or two. We have 50+ people who are making progress on individual components every day -- and, therefore, changing this simulation every single day.
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, even when there are dozens of technically challenging things working flawlessly in videos we release online, if there’s just one thing that’s disappointing, it will create chatter online about the game not being a quality game. It’s better for us not to release such a video at all.
I’m not aware of any other team -- big or small -- that is trying to create a procedurally generated simulation (especially with AI!!!) in a high-quality first-person shooter. It is certainly the hardest challenge I’ve tackled in 30+ years, for reasons that don’t become apparent until you try to tackle them.
Nevertheless, all this unpredictability has led us to the horrible situation where we keep promising you dates and then missing them. Please believe me when I say that this weighs heavily on our whole team. Your enthusiasm for what we’re doing has kept us motivated especially when so many others have lobbed grenades at us from the bleachers. You are very important to us.
We want to do right by you, but we also know that the thing you want most from us is to actually play this game.
We are definitely inching our way closer to this day, and we believe the simulation we’re creating will make you proud of the support you’ve given us. Until then, I think it’s better for us to stop making promises and stay focused on making the game.
Right now, the thing that’s stopping us from releasing videos is a myriad of small issues created by recent performance optimizations, like vases popping in and out of view incorrectly and weapon reload sounds not playing. We thought all of these would be addressed last week. It could happen tomorrow. Or, it could be next week. As soon as it’s done, we’ll continue capturing video that we can release here.
I hope you don’t mind my frankness about our priorities and that this transparency is useful.
Thanks,
Peter
Note From Victura's CEO - March 7, 2023
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