Five years of Subsurf…Barotrauma

Hello everyone!

Before we get to the customary Halloween update, we wanted to write a little bit about bigger things – about what to expect from the near future, and about how we already have a mind-boggling five years of development behind us.

Five years

Wait, what? Yes, that’s right – tomorrow marks exactly five years since I released the first public build for what was then called Subsurface and these days, of course, goes by the name Barotrauma. For those not in the know, back in the day, it was a little hobby project of mine that I did in my free time while working on other game projects at FakeFish.

It wasn’t very pretty back then, but maybe you can still see some of the same DNA?

Five years later, the project is big enough that the good people of FakeFish barely remember what free time looks like! Jokes aside, the game has come an incredibly long way in this time, surpassing even my wildest dreams many times over. So, with all that already done…

What’s next?

Even before the first public build, when I first announced that I would be making this game, I used the word “ambitious” to describe the list of planned features. That much remains the same, and the roadmap still ahead of us might seem pretty daunting if Barotrauma was still a solo project with just the beginnings of a following. With a team of over a dozen people and the beautiful community that has grown around the game, the roadmap looks more like an invitation to keep exploring! So, let’s take a look at the next steps on that road.

The Halloween update is up next, and we’re going to write another post about that once it hits Steam. In a nutshell: it will be a small-ish update focused on a few exciting content additions as well as some QoL improvements, such as the added option of a profanity filter for the server browser, and – finally! – undo/redo functionality for the submarine editor.

After that, we turn our eye to the next big content update. It’s still a little too far in the future to set a lot of it in stone, but we plan to release it before the year is out, and if all goes well, it will contain two long-awaited additions: the environment overhaul and the ballast flora. In their own way, both are intended to bring more diversity and continuity to the campaign, with the changing environments further highlighting your progress, and the ballast flora progressing with you if you’re not careful, adding some much-needed diversity to the many dangers of Europa. There will be much besides these in the update too, including a couple of new mission types to, again, bring some added variety to gameplay.

Following this major update, we’re probably releasing a couple of smaller updates again before the next big thing. That’s all in the distant future, though, so we’ll get back to you on that!

That’s all for today. Stay tuned for the Halloween update, and take a look at this five-year retrospective that we made – this will be fun to look back on, another five years from now.

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