The Company news was shared today:
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The Company - Backend Roadmap: (June 2025 - December 2025)
- Reevaluate and rebuild condition checks throughout the game
- Update code base, improving readability and efficiency and removing (lots) of depreciated functions and passages
- Update UI elements and identify QOL improvements
- Expect to re-release The Company January 2026
The Company - Release Roadmap: (January 2026 - December 2026)
- Start work on implementing Chapter 5
- Finish adding character content for characters lacking it
- Wrap up any remaining systems that need it
- Add endings and epilogues
- Expect to release The Company in H2 2026
The Company - Working Under the Hood
So for those who have been paying close attention, this won't be super illuminating, but right now the biggest thing holding back expansion and development of The Company is the fact that over the years of learning and stumbling, the game has become a tight, entangled web of mysteries... which sounds cool but super isn't.
To put it more plainly, if I wanted to add new scenes or change how something works, or even address bugs and issues, it means navigating a dark labyrinth of conditions and events that reference events that reference events that use a macro that was made for the one event that has to be referenced by... you get the idea. This specific complexity is further complicated by the game's inherent need to account for all possible MC and NPC states in any given scene, which is of course the game's bread and butter.
The only way to address this is to go in with a sledgehammer and start ripping out legacy, antiquated systems and functions, and rebuild the engine in a way that is presentably familiar (if not identical) but mechanically sustainable... and the only way to do that is too effectively halt development on the game entirely until renovations have completed.
Without the need to release steady updates for the game, this is a task that I'm now actually excited to tackle, time consuming and frustrating as I expect it to be. The end result is going to be a version of The Company that, from a developer point of view, actually MAKES SENSE for once. For the players, this translates into a way to quickly and easily introduce new content into the game, and identify where things are going wrong.
I expect this to be finished by the end of the year at the latest, which means 2026 is going to "start" with The Company going full bore on implementing Chapter 5, wrapping up character arcs, and introducing proper endings and epilogues to the game. You can expect dev blogs to drop from now til then going over progress being made to this end!
This has been a lengthy one, which is actually kind of comforting for those who remember how we operated from the beginning. I can't wait to share more on both games, and until then, thank you all for your continued feedback and support!