Heyo All!

Well it’s that time of year again. Holidays? No! The annual game status update!

First of all, it may come to no surprise but the game ain’t coming out this year. As I’m sure you are used to hearing from everywhere, the current world state has slowed down production. Trust us when I say we want the game to be done just as much as you do. We are certainly disappointed that we are missing our 2020 deadline but this year has been a hard one to predict. That doesn’t mean we didn’t make a lot of awesome progress throughout the year on Cosmo’s, so there is still plenty to get excited about!

Almost all of our time this year has been working on tweaking the campaign, with our attention focused on the systems between each day of active quickstop duty. This includes things like revising the story progression with a ton of new cutscenes, testing many different campaign checkpoints and difficulties, a new pass on the upgrade system, and a focus on more simple transparency of gameplay mechanics. We even added in amenity fatigue, which gives bonuses and penalties for using under and overused amenities respectively. With a new focus on player flexibility the game has become far more interesting and fun to play, which has been our goal from the start!

To test all these changes we have been doing a lot of playtesting, both internally and externally. However, this is harder than it normally is with our inability to do external playtesting in person (both in small scale and in conventions). Luckily, a lot of people stepped up to the challenge of virtual testing, recording themselves playing and providing lots of written feedback. All this info takes a lot of time to analyze and distill. This did slow down production some but this process is 100% necessary to make an awesome game which we are very much on track to do.

So, let's get to the main question. When is the game coming out if not now? When it's done is all I can say. We thought we were getting close to done this summer. However, after a large round of external playtesting we found the game just wasn’t quite ready yet. Too many small things in the game were stuck being at good enough instead of great. The main game is super fun and awesome but our playtesting was showing that the in between moments weren’t quite matching that level of quality and polish that we were striving for. So we committed ourselves to bringing everything up to the level of quality that we thought you folks deserved.

The entire fall has had us focused on analyzing the data, implementing revisions, and completing internal testing. And the good news is that we are about done with this process, which means that we are about ready for another round of external testing! And if that goes well, we actually might be kind of close to being done!

So all I can say is keep your fingers crossed for us. Things are looking up. And just maybe there will be a quickstop opening near you sometime soon.

Ian Beckman
Director
Big Sir Games