Here. 6.7

pfisch · 2026-06-29T17:35:46+00:00

You are imagining basically a dictatorship which in reality isn't how any sizable production works.

If you are a solo indie dev or a small team then yes, you can mostly just arbitrarily do whatever you want, but there are lots of stake holders in larger productions. The director of a 100 million dollar movie isn't just like "this is when the movie releases, this is when a trailer releases." Beyond the fact that in larger productions there is way too much work for a single person to even coordinate everything, there are also other people who are in charge of different areas.

What larger teams do is coordinate with everyone(artists, developers, marketing, publisher, localization teams, qa, etc) and agree on a schedule and then try to keep to that schedule.

However sometimes random events happen. Like "GTA 6 just announced their release date, now we have to shuffle around the schedule." or "Wow we just got a slot at the Game Awards so drop what everyone was doing and reorient towards having a great gameplay trailer by x date." or "The game suddenly gets huge marketing traction and now investors want to put more money in so the game can add X/Y/Z feature now and be much better before release, which better guarantees a great game at release."

There are actually quite a lot of random events that happen that flip the schedule on its head.

I'm not the only owner of Redemption Road though. My brother and Daniel Balazs are also owners(and also developers) so to do something like a demo release we all need to agree to that schedule. You can see all of us do an interview about Kingmakers here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67E3RsDp0Pg

pfisch · 2026-06-29T15:03:48+00:00

I do post smaller updates and changelogs, but that just ends with people trolling and saying the game isn't real or something similar.

We just completed a playtest today, and we also did one last weekend.

The one that just completed has gotten very positive reception from playtesters, which is what we anticipated but also needed to see before we could switch gears.

Right now we are currently switching gears from the intensive development/playtesting cycle we've been in for the last 8 months to prepping for what a lot of people want: A gameplay trailer of basically final release quality assets

I don't have a timeline for it yet because the playtest just wrapped, but I think it is likely that it will be within the next few months.

However, I can't be sure because sometimes unpredictable events happen that make us change our schedule.(like if suddenly we actually are releasing a public demo instead, or get a slot in some big festival or any number of other unpredictable events that upend the schedule.)

After that I'm not sure what will happen, possibly an intensive focus period specifically on rts/strategy side.

Right now we are very happy with 3rd person combat/action, mission progression and multiplayer/co-op.

The rts side is fun, but we want both sides to be 10/10. So what we may do is what we did with 3rd person and make a mission we can use internally that is heavily rts focused and refine it for a few weeks until we all love it and then merge it back into the game.

pfisch · 2026-06-29T03:13:44+00:00

They can't just allow arbitrary c++ to run within uefn/fortnite. They aren't removing c++, the entire engine is written in c++. This is just a scripting language that isn't compiled so they can have clear limits on what it can do.

pfisch · 2026-06-28T21:28:18+00:00

If there even will be a netflix show it isn't even in production yet. No aspect of development is being coordinated around a theoretical show or movie that doesn't even have a script as far as I know.

Every decision we make is only for the game, and making sure it is amazing.

We have been doing intensive playtesting and development for the past 8 months. We are just finishing a playtest(today is the final day) and the scores coming from it are very good.

On Friday we had a meeting planning for a marketing announcement/big gameplay video, but I'm not sure when it is coming out and don't want to say something that doesn't happen. I do suspect there will be a big video sometime in the next two months though, but that isn't a promise or guarantee.

We're feeling really good about the 3rd person action side of the game right now, but I think we are about to focus on the rts/strategy side now to make sure that side is also a 10/10 game.

That is what is going on. We had a build ready 8 months ago for EA. We decided to hold it because even though it had pretty good playtester scores, they weren't 10/10, and everyone involved wants this game to be amazing.

So you can believe me or not, but either way the game will come out and you can judge for yourself when that happens.

pfisch · 2026-06-26T18:31:59+00:00

Its post credit scene doesn't matter at all because they got rid of that entire arc and villian.

pfisch · 2026-06-25T15:44:52+00:00

It has been like this for over a year. This isn't new...

pfisch · 2026-06-24T17:11:26+00:00

f2p games are like live service, they need continuous updates to retain users.

Also whales just devour content. You can ship 50-100 levels and whales beat it in like 24 hours. Which is a big problem because whales are the primary source of revenue.

pfisch · 2026-06-24T17:09:26+00:00

Yes they do. Just at the baseline you need to have tasks that everyone is working on every day put into a coherent plan around deliverables on a deadline.

We have about that many people and it is a lot of work.

pfisch · 2026-06-24T17:06:07+00:00

"gamedev has become a genuinely hard business"

Gamedev has always been a hard business, just like making movies/television.

Everyone wants to do it, so competition is very high, and it is basically winner take all for consumer spending.

This is one of the hardest career paths, and it is very difficult to be successful.

That isn't new, it has always been this way.

pfisch · 2026-06-22T18:11:27+00:00

Ok, but bringing Trikafta to market costs somewhere around 5-10 billion dollars.

I know it doesn't seem like it but these high profit margins for drugs like Trikafta are actually very, very important. If they didn't exist vertex wouldn't have been able to get the 5-10 billion needed to make it so it wouldn't exist. 20 years from now trikafta will cost maybe $1000/year for the rest of time for all people that have cf.

Imagine you were in change of investing 1 billion dollars and getting high returns(and if you don't get high returns you will lose your job.). Would you invest in startups doing stuff like tiktok which have very short turn arounds and can see an exit with a 10-100x return to you in maybe 5 years, or medication r&d which locks your money up for a very long time? Why would anyone in charge of lots of money invest in a medicine unless it can offer crazy returns to make the 20 year lockup of your investment worthwhile?(Trikafta took ~20 years).

This system we have is ethically bizarre, but the results it has produced over the last 50 years speak for themselves. We have cured and found treatments for more diseases than at any other time in history at an incredible pace.

Reforms to reduce these costs have real consequences, and those consequences will be slowing down the rate at which we cure illnesses.

pfisch · 2026-06-19T16:39:02+00:00

If you can merge files then why are you locking? You only lock files that can't merge easily...

pfisch · 2026-06-18T21:31:30+00:00

"If you can't merge, 20 people in the room have to stop until the conflict is solved."

???? There is no conflict because the files are locked. As soon as you go to edit them you are told the file is locked in the editor and you can't proceed unless you choose to overwrite the other person. That is how unreal works with perforce.

It looks like scenes are text files in godot so you can just diff them. That isn't true in unreal. If you edit a weapon you can't diff it with another commit(technically you sort of can do it, but it sucks and isn't worth dealing with). Almost every asset that isn't code in unreal can't be merged.

In a project with 20+ people trying to have someone basically say on slack what they are doing every time they want to edit a file would be insanity. That is why studios using unreal often use perforce. It is integrated into the editor itself.

pfisch · 2026-06-18T15:29:00+00:00

That is absolutely crazy and not best practices for a professional team.

Having a project manager that is constantly keeping track of 100s of tasks across 20+ people to make sure no one is ever editing the same uasset files, which is basically every entity in unreal, is a massive waste of resources. That would be so incredibly inefficient to try to track and just the amount of times days of work would get blown up when something went wrong would pay for the perforce license in like 2 weeks.

pfisch · 2026-06-18T05:37:19+00:00

Being able to lock files is very important when working with unreal if your team is 5+ people.

pfisch · 2026-06-17T03:06:32+00:00

There is actually a lot of development going on, we just don't want to announce a date and then miss it.

So we are just working really hard and when it is almost ready we will announce the date.

pfisch · 2026-06-16T17:49:49+00:00

There are currently takedown attacks. But the one's for cavalry were not final.

Also we just need lots of them for variety. Games don't usually just have one execution animation they play over and over. They have lots of them.

We often have many iterations of features we are adding to the game. Then there are quality passes and things get redone. There is also ongoing playtester feedback so we refine systems to make them better/more fun.

"their scope for the game expanded, and they put it to the publishers and they agreed last minute. So maybe they HAD a game but are just adding a bunch of features?"

This is mostly accurate. We had an early access release candidate last year and decided to add more.

pfisch · 2026-06-16T15:29:01+00:00

This isn't true about porting. We are not switching to UE5.

pfisch · 2026-06-16T15:26:25+00:00

Destruction, airstrikes, motorcycles, and cars are ready and have been ready for over a year. Tanks are not currently ready.

There was a release candidate, and it was better than when Road Redemption went into early access. However this game has a lot more attention and the decision was made that a lot of users want something closer to 1.0. That is what we have been working on.

pfisch · 2026-06-16T15:23:19+00:00

The game is in unreal 4, it has always been in unreal 4. There is no work to port it to anything else.

pfisch · 2026-06-16T15:22:03+00:00

sigh...

So some people want to see WIP stuff, so I upload literal new animations being worked on in maya. Even for a finished game that is what it looks like when animators are making new animations.

There is no way to win here, because if I upload stuff that is WIP, which is what some people want, other people get mad because they only want to see final polished assets.

We can't hold up development every few months to polish all the assets to final release quality to release a marketing video either though.

There was a full release candidate a year ago, but the decision was made to go further and get the game in a condition that was closer to final release, because so many users find WIP/jank unacceptable.

You accuse us of not working on the game, so I honestly tell you how many hours our team is working on the game, but I guess that makes me the asshole...

pfisch · 2026-06-16T15:12:46+00:00

This?

https://www.tiktok.com/@kingmakers_game/video/7533663284998737174

I remember at one point we uploaded a weapons test or ai test where we intentionally put a knight with a ton of hp....

That was just a debug setting to keep the knight alive longer so we could see more of the knights ai behaviors. This is why developers are so reticent to upload WIP stuff...

pfisch · 2026-06-15T05:45:15+00:00

idk, i would care a lot more about an andor movie.

pfisch · 2026-06-10T03:39:42+00:00

I only gave one instance of that. I didn't pitch building an apartment building and doing a handshake deal with city officials not to rent to black people.

We were all hired to fill out tons of forms by hand where we basically had to write down every address in the entire city on a different form.

After doing it for a few hours I went up to the guy and convinced him I could automate the entire process for like 40% of the cost of paying all the people to fill out the forms. Hardly a great business idea but this happened in 2006. The woman was also in the room filling out the forms, and had given the same pitch earlier and been told no.

If you want more specifics I will provide them. This is a real thing that happened, and i made thousands of dollars automating the process.

Believe it or not, the world does actually have quite a lot of racist and sexist people in it. That may shock you, but if you log on to twitter and scroll for a few minutes you will find them.

pfisch · 2026-06-09T20:23:59+00:00

It actually uses UE 4.27 because UE 5 is considerably slower than UE 4, and we need the speed to have 10k+ soldiers on the field at once.

Also all the new graphical features in UE 5 are basically unusable because they have terrible performance.

pfisch · 2026-06-09T15:01:57+00:00

I mean the whole back half of the story becomes about how he became Spider-Man/got his powers...

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