Happy birthday Barotrauma!

Hello everyone!

Today marks one year since we started Barotrauma’s early access on Steam. Whatever the exact time when you joined our ever-growing crew of Europan explorers, THANK YOU for being a part of our journey – it means the world to us to have gathered so many people in our drowning simulator when it’s not even finished yet!

A toast to you!

A year in early access

It may seem strange to celebrate having spent a year in what many consider a dubious development limbo and the promised land of abandonware. Needless to say, we don’t think early access means those things at all; in fact, one year into it, we continue to think early access is a pretty neat concept, allowing us to make full use of visibility on Steam to get more and more feedback while still being able to develop the game further. It may have been slow going at times – sometimes slower than we had hoped – but on the upside, that’s also given us more time to get to know our players and learn some valuable lessons about what releasing a game entails.

So we wanted to put pen to paper about what the past year has been like for us and what we hope happens next. First, let’s reminisce in numbers – the past 366 days were made up of…

22 updates and patches

9,409 commits in our GitHub repository

2,479 tickets closed in our issue tracker

Over 3,600 new reviews written on our Steam store page

Almost 4,000 new members joining our Discord server

Those numbers are something to be modestly proud of! Even with the long list of things still to be done, it definitely feels like we’ve come a long way since last summer. If you’ve already forgotten what Barotrauma looked like back in the day, maybe this blast from the past will jog your memory…

In the time leading up to our early access release, we were itching to finally get the game out on Steam after a year and a half of toiling away on it in relative quiet (and a much longer time for the lead developer). We were also really nervous about what would happen once we made it that far.

Now we’re…a year older and otherwise exactly the same! We can’t wait to finally release that campaign update we’ve been talking about forever and implement something in the center of the map. At the same time, we’re biting our nails just thinking about our players walking the halls of explorable outposts and buying submarine upgrades for the first time. Are you going to like it? It seems going forward with something so anticipated is never easy on the nerves – but so far, we’ve felt well rewarded for our efforts, thanks to all the encouragement from you!

Up next

More new things coming soon!

Then, about what’s next – you may have noticed we rarely state explicit ETAs, but for our birthday, we should give at least a rough estimate, shouldn’t we? So, the campaign update is planned to roll out in approximately 6–8 weeks. Even though many features will be first introduced as minimum viable versions, it’s still going to be the biggest update we’ve made. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

The tester version

The really rough, far-from-feature-complete first version of the campaign update can already be played by anyone who owns Barotrauma. Indeed – did you know you can play new content before it’s released? Welcome on board the public unstable beta! Find out more in this blog post and join the tester talk in the #baro-unstable channel of our Discord server. More bug reports is better, especially when it comes to this monster of an update.

Thank you barotraumites

That’s all this time – stay tuned for a sneak peek of how to upgrade your submarines and buy and sell stuff at outposts, coming shortly. In the meantime, you’ve still got a week left to join this wreck building competition that our Discord mentors are holding. Don’t miss out!

One more time, thank you for joining our early access journey. The best part is knowing we’ve passed the halfway mark with this project, and we’ve still got you with us. Write to you again soon!

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