I thought I'd write this post for two reasons; I haven't done one in a while, and I'm going to talk about what we've been up to and how it will affect my relationship with Patreon. I started this Patreon page shortly after Final Outpost was released on the App Store nearly a year ago. For the first few months I focused on fixing bugs and important issues players experienced upon launch to relieve most of the major pain points. Myself and my friend, and co-worker, Ewan worked on new content for the game over the summer of 2020, which culminated in the release of the expansive 1.1 update in late August. The feedback on our work was and is hugely positive!

My plans after this stage were to translate the game into multiple languages so that more people could experience it, and add incremental amounts of new content (new building levels etc.). I'm grateful to all those who offered their translation skills to benefit other players and the community in general. However, as it has done previously, the demands of university have made this a challenging task. On a technical level the translation process will be made more problematic because all buttons in the game are images at the moment, so I would need to completely change how they work to accomodate multi-lingual buttons. 

Although there has been a lack of updates over the last 5-6 months, I have formed a small squadron in the meantime. And we've been able to think much bigger than short-term content updates for Final Outpost. Particularly in the time after its launch, one of the main criticisms and barriers to the success of Final Outpost was the lack of Android support. We've decided that this presents a task of greater importance than multi-language support restricted to iOS. As such, since late 2020 we have been making steps toward this goal.

The first thing I've done is to team up with the two reliable lads that I worked with during the development of some parts of Final Outpost. The first is Ben, my brother, who originally made the pixel artwork for the game world. He is actually now a computer science student and has a lot of experience with Unity, so his interests with respect to game development have since shifted to the technical side. He has therefore taken up the opportunity to be the CTO of my new company, Exabyte Games. Working alongside him will be his friend Ben (known by many as Big Ben), who is also a computer science student at Southampton University. Together, the Ben-Ben duo will be the great stallions pushing to recreate Final Outpost in the Unity engine. What does this mean? Well, later this year we should have Final Outpost on both Android and iOS. Crucially, we will also be able to update both versions of the game simultaneously, bringing more updates to the game on both platforms later in the year.

The other legend in the team is our resident digital marketer, Ewan, who has created some of the graphics for Final Outpost before and is the man behind all versions of our websites. Speaking of websites - check out https://www.exabytegames.com/ (there's not much there yet, but keep an eye on it over the coming months). Together, we're planning for a big 2021 and hope to bring players more to look forward to later this year, if as Exabyte Games rather than Sam Clothier.

Because of these major changes, to me at least, it makes sense to take a break from Patreon. This is because, whilst we are working on bringing a new version of Final Outpost to you all, little will be seen from us from the perspective of current players. I can't justify maintaining a monthly support platform whilst I don't have the time to reward Patrons for their generosity. Maybe in the future we will figure out a way for you to be able to support us at Exabyte Games if there is such a desire.

I'd like to thank all prior and current Patrons for helping make this whole thing possible; without the amazing response to the game we wouldn't be able to carry on working on it and make new games in the future!

I hope you're as excited as we are.

Cheers,

Sam