Thank you 2.0 & latest news! (Patreon)

Dear Patrons, first of all big thanks for your ongoing support! Here's the latest news:

Back in December 2018, I was contacted by an Australian studio to help them work on a game (codename: UOT2) for Apple Arcade - I decided to accept, mainly because I was getting more and more into debt, with monthly expenses around 2.5K, for rent, school & kindergarten fees and feeding a family of four. While I was able to work on Beware in parallel and release v006, with advancing time, work on UOT2 got more and more time-consuming and I was not able to finish and publish v007 yet. I was very close to burnout on multiple occasions - as you can imagine, working on two games and raising two small children is intense, to put it mildly. We're submitting UOT2 to Apple next Friday, and then, it's back to business!

I should add that your monthly patreon pledges were a huge help and saved us from famine on the many occasions when payments from Apple were delayed! And now, on to the good news about Beware:

Funding for the full game:

The good thing about the situation described above is that it allowed me to take a more relaxed stance on finding the best funding opportunity. First, Devolver Digital showed interest in publishing the game - they never responded after I sent them the last build, so I guess it's clear they're out. There are currently two other options on the table and one of them would mean a very significant budget for production. In fact it would allow me to hire top talent from the games industry - this was always my main worry; how to get the best programmers & 3D artists for Beware. The only drawback is that it would mean exclusivity for one year on one platform before it would get released on all other platforms. I think one year is OK, and no, it's not EGS :) Since I signed an NDA, I can't say more unfortunately.

Research:

Since one of the main themes in Beware will be Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), I contacted Professor Stuart Russell from Berkeley to ask him if he'd be willing to help me write a scientifically plausible storyline. He politely declined, for lack of time, and suggested I join a private AI Safety discussion group on facebook to find the right people. This meant that I had to "get smart" about the subject - this included reading the books of reference: Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence" and Max Tegmark's "Life 3.0", both which I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone interested in the future of humanity. Long story short, I now have a PhD candidate from the University of Toronto to help me.

So what about v007?

First, I thought about releasing a smaller update with added storyline elements but then I added two 4x4km terrains, which make the game's world 3x bigger now. It's still a WIP and I think it would take months to finish, while only providing additional roads and a slightly different geographical setting.

Second, I've been playing around the idea of adding racing to the game. The driving AI is definitely competent enough for that purpose - but racing would have to make sense in the context of the storyline.

Third, I can now afford to buy a VR headset, like the Occulus Rift S, and try to make a VR version of the prologue - but if the majority of you don't own a VR headset then it makes no sense to do that.

All three options mean that I would have to do some serious optimization work to achieve better performance. VR would need a solid 80fps @ 2.5K resolution. So I'm not sure about this, and if you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments below.

In all cases, I do not want to tease you guys with upcoming content that has no palpable release date so please feel free to reduce or delete your pledges - you will all get v007 independently of that.

Thanks again for your vital support,

Best wishes to you all,

Ondrej