Hey!

This is the first of hopefully many, many posts I'll make here.

The Snow War is now live in Early Access and some people even have magically found and are playing the game! The success has not been great, but don't worry: This has always been a passion project for us, and the continuing it is not up to us getting financial success right away, or at all for that matter.

We will continue developing the game from here, until unforeseeable future. Our hope is to reach 1.0 by the end of the next year, but we will do this being responsible for keeping up the quality of our work and quality of our own and our close ones lives.

Please join our Discord [discord.gg]as this is where we are most easily reachable, if you have any ideas, questions and so on.

When I say WE, I talk abot me (Teemu, lead dev, modeling, maps, coding) along with Jan (coder) and Atte (music, ideas, design, testing).

So: WE have now established the next roadmap for the next months of development:

I have begun working on a new map. There is not much I can share yet, other than two things: This will take us a bit pack to the roots of the original HL1 mod and it is a place where snow might not be the most common element. The map will also link up to a new game mode we have in place, which will be asymmetric CTF style gameplay. Stay tuned for this one. Things might also change depending how the playtesting goes for as this progresses. When it comes to making maps, it is rarely a complete 100% vision when you start making it, but it is more akin to "oh let's add a happy little tree here" x 1000.

We will add hats. There will be more than two.

We will add Steam achievements to the game. We are trying to make something fresh here, so it will not just be all "get 10 eliminations", "get 100 eliminations" but something else as well. Any ideas, drop by our Discord[discord.gg]!

This should not be obviously visible to the player, but we will rewrite the weapon system we currently have in place. While preparing for the EA-release we had numerous issues with the current Snowbow mechanics. This was related to it being interconnected with the "standard snowball system". We decided we want to take this system apart and rebuild it almost entirely using C++. C++ is this a fancy thing we use to write the game with.

We already have a second weapon 70% complete with arts and mechanics, but we want to take short pause and make sure we have a more robust system in place. We want to avoid any lock-ups or situations where some has an unfair advantage/disadvantage due to us having a less than optimal solution. This will hopefully also open us to make new weapons in more flexible & creative ways.

So there we go! I will try and keep posting these as we make progress. I am also looking on how we can provide Early Access players access to the content we are working on. We might do one server that runs a work-in-progress version of the map once we have a crude version of it, so you can take an early sneak peek.

But until next time, let's chat in Discord/here and keep cool everyone ːsteamhappyː

-

Teemu aka Zilppuri

We are beyond excited to finally be announcing the release date of Snow War Early Access. Mark your calendars!

We have been working on Snow War for six years now. For the last three years the game has been developed by a two person team .Due to different life events we have needed to take a break from time to time, but we have been giving the finishing touches in the lat months and are confident that things will go smoothly (enough) for our first public release!

Remember to also click in to the Playtest! We are letting in more players nearing the release. Having people play the game has been super helpful and we have gotten so much useful feedback. This feedback has already driven our development.

One of these things was that during the past month we have finished up the Team Fight mode. You can join our dedicated servers or host your own team mode. The host can also divide up players to their own teams, or allow everyone to pick their team. We will work on more team fight modes in the next months after we are in Early Access.

We have also fixed over 50 bugs we have found during playtesting. Bugs are inevitable still present when we go live on Early Access - this is simply part of software development. But also as professional software developers by day trade, me and Jan will try and fix these before they get to be any larger issue.

If you want to be part of our community, please visit our Discord[discord.gg]. We are there to hear your feedback and help you in any way.

Let's see on 3rd of April!

Best regards,

Teemu Polvi

Snow War Lead Developer

PS. No, AI did not have role writing this, despite that one dash there. I just like dashes and you can't take them away from me <3