Hey Gungeoneers! We wanted to give you all an update on AG&D and what we’ve been up to these past few months, as well as apologize for being late and our up-to-now radio silence.
First and foremost, what you can probably guess: we've been working hard to ensure our Advanced Gungeons & Draguns update is up to the quality that you have hopefully come to expect from us, but we have hit a couple of major delays.
The Switch version took far more time and resources than we initially expected. We have help with our ports, and we assumed initially that porting to Switch would not be substantially more complicated than porting to Xbox One, but the Switch version needed very low-level restructuring in a way that only someone with intimate knowledge of how the game was architected could accomplish in any reasonable amount of time. This is stuff we almost certainly would’ve had to do before our next update (after AG&D), so it isn’t strictly Switch-specific, but we had to adjust our timetable substantially. Once it was completed, there were of course the normal several weeks of further support and bug-fixing. In short, the Switch version became considerably more of a time-sink than we had anticipated, and ground the development of AG&D to a crawl. We've been working full-time on the update for weeks now, and we are happy to report things are going smoothly.
(For the curious: due to certain requirements as part of the Switch specification we had to completely rewrite how Gungeon stores and loads objects in and out of memory, which, as I'm sure you can imagine, is a pretty fundamental part of the game. The good news is, this reduced the filesize of Gungeon substantially, from about a gigabyte to around three hundred megabytes on Switch. This is an improvement that will come to other platforms, though the specific size changes might vary.)
The second delay came from some indecision as to what to include in AG&D and what to include in possible future updates. In our usual way, we kept adding stuff to AG&D until it had grown substantially beyond our original announced plans. This, coupled with the Switch interruption, meant that we spent a decent amount of time working on content that ultimately will probably be included in an update after AG&D. This is good news in a way, in that it means we're ahead of schedule on a future update... but obviously was bad news in the short run for AG&D. That said, we're absolutely not cutting anything we've announced for AG&D--all this additional content is secret stuff we've not talked about yet! Anything you've heard us say will be in AG&D absolutely will still be.
Basically, we put too many bullets in the chamber at once. We'll do another update once we're absolutely certain of a release date for AG&D, in the same way that we only announced a Switch release date right before it came out. In fact, this will almost certainly just become Dodge Roll policy; we'll still announce cool stuff, but we're just really bad at making date predictions. This makes the official release date of AG&D “soon," where "soon" means "more than a week and less than four months." Our apologies for having psyched you up so far in advance, and thank you very much for your continued patience and support for us. We're lucky to have a really supportive community, and honestly we can't wait to have you play through what we've got in store. A lot of it will be welcome changes, and some of it, we're sure, will be a sadistic surprise.
EDIT: I'd just like to add how unbelievably nice it is to see all of the thanks and the nice comments in the responses. I was really tempted to reply to all of you! Please know that it is super appreciated.
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