Vaporum: Lockdown Release Window Updated

Stuck working from home during the crucial final steps of development, Fatbot Games had to postpone the release of their upcoming steampunk dungeon crawler Vaporum: Lockdown to an unspecified summer 2020 date. Still, this means that barring any additional delays, the game should be launching within the next few months for PC, and then coming to the consoles soon after. Here’s more on that:

Hey, fellow crawlers!

We are sorry to inform you that we have to delay the release of Vaporum: Lockdown. This is nothing too special with what’s going on in the world, but still, we feel you deserve more than a dry announcement.

Although nobody in our team has been affected by the disease directly, working from home has had a significant impact on the project. It’s been a big challenge organization-wise. During this finish-line phase, the remaining tasks tend to be small but many. Which requires more communication than actual work, and that’s difficult, as we can’t deal with things face to face. No matter, our 5-member team is pushing through the issues as best as we can; it simply takes more time.

To be specific: we’re in the last phase of environmental work on levels, scripting / balancing the last few remaining puzzles, tweaking enemy animations & timings, and working on the game’s boss fight (which we are very excited about!). Also, some of the nice things like intro & outro cinematics are coming together.

The release day is drawing near, slowly coming out of the mist, the more we work on the game. Our current estimate is that we will be able to announce a specific release date for the PC (Steam, GOG, etc.) roughly within a month, and that it will be released during the Summer of 2020. Consoles will follow shortly after, beginning with the Nintendo Switch (being tested along with the PC version), and then XB1 and PS4.

It’s mostly because there are a lot of onboarding steps for each platform, and we can only do so much with such a small team. Originally, we wanted to avoid a staggered release like this, but at least we’ll do our best to release on each platform in the shortest possible time. We’re not happy with it, but in a team with only 2 programmers, it’s virtually impossible to work on the base PC version and all the ports at once, and release the game everywhere on the same day. Such an approach would also cause a significant delay of the PC release, and we don’t think that would be fair to our players either.

One of the good things is that the game will be localized in all the languages as in Vaporum – but from day one (of course still allowing you guys to write your own translations).

You can trust that we’re doing our very best to make the game a worthy prequel to Vaporum, with all the new features working towards a much better player experience.

Thank you for your understanding! We just can’t wait till you lay your hands on the game! 🙂

Stay strong & healthy!