"Thank you all for waiting patiently for the patch to come. We’re hoping for it to roll out this month!"
Kia ora everyone, I wanted to give y'all an update on where we're at with patching the Xbox/Game Pass/Microsoft Store version of Before We Leave!
What we’ve been working on
We've been gathering and sending information on bugs and UX issues since launch to our partners (Team17 & DoGames) who helped us port BWL to Xbox. We know that they're in the process of finding the cause of the issues, testing the fixes and also localising the changes (i.e, getting all the changes translated into the 9 languages BWL supports).
How we’re approaching this, and why
When we first launched all the way back in May 2020 we were way faster with rolling out patches - but although we fixed the bugs we found that we'd often break things too. Slowing the pace a bit and making sure problems are actually sorted out rather than panicking and band-aid fixing problems has become our priority. While slower, the way we go about resolving issues is much more robust now.
Why are there bugs in the first place?
Despite our BWL port being in quality assurance for several months, nothing exposes bugs more than introducing a game to literally thousands of people, and our launch on Xbox/Game Pass/the Microsoft store has done just that. And also, to be super honest, we never thought BWL would get ported to the Xbox, so it was made without any of those expectations (seriously, when you’re a tiny indie studio in New Zealand, launching on a PC platform is intimidating, let alone a console)! So, needless to say, converting it has been a challenge.
When is the patch coming?
Thank you all for waiting patiently for the patch to come. We’re hoping for it to roll out this month! I know it's super frustrating that these changes haven't been rolled out faster but trust me, we are doing everything we can. For transparency, there are a few challenges facing us right now;
- There are five parties working together here - our studio, Team17 (publisher), DoGames (the porting company), Xbox and KeyWords Studios (our language localiser). The more parties you involve in a project, the longer it tends to take. We’re all doing our best though!
- It's the end of the year - December is a notoriously busy time for just about every industry and the games industry is no different. People are also beginning to go on holidays! Getting stuff done around this time is hard.
- Before We Leave isn’t just in English - we support about 9 other languages and each text change has to be converted to those languages.
- Finally, as I mentioned before, thorough quality assurance and testing takes time. We want to get this right for you all.
Patch Notes
Please note that this patch isn’t live yet! As I mentioned above, we’re not sure when this patch will arrive, but I wanted to get these patch notes out before we commence our Christmas holidays.
Xbox Change Log, Build v1.0245.20
- Fixed an issue where “Stasis Boxes” can stop you from selecting buildings.
- Fixed the Splash image and background image as they were previously offset.
- Fixed an issue where rotating your building could cause the input to lock unless the Right Stick was used.
- Added tooltip to explain to users how to re-select a ship.
- Added a tooltip to explain how to access Space quickly.
- Save Game window has been resized to fix the clipped-out cursor and discard white space.
- Fixed an issue with the save error screen where Cursor was too large.
- Fixed incorrect terminology used in “RB” for the ‘Resource Management’ hint for French and Spanish.
- Fixed incorrect terminology used in “RB” for the ‘Planet Information’ hint for French and Spanish
- Fixed incorrect terminology used in “RB” for the ‘Default Shipping Resource’ hint for French and Spanish.
- Fixed incorrect terminology for 'D-Pad' in Brazilian Portuguese.
- Fixed Incorrect terminology used for 'LB' and 'RB' in the 'Welcome' hint for French, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese
Windows Change Log, Build v1.0245.6
- Removed option to change file names. There are 9 save slots and these are shared with Xbox builds. (Emily’s note - we believe renaming files may have been causing some of the save game issues that have been reported)
- Fixed a Save/Load issue where reloading your save game during the “Construct 3 tiles of road” would become undone.
- Fixed the “Tinker” & “Grand Tinker” achievements not unlocking on Gamepass build.
- Fixed the “Astronaut” & “Space Admiral” achievement not unlocking on Gamepass build.
- Fixed the "Captain" & "Admiral" achievements not unlocking on Gamepass Build.
One final note - you might notice a couple of issues here haven’t been mentioned specifically. DoGames have had some issues replicating certain bugs, so if there’s something you’re experiencing that hasn’t been resolved, please report it via this link.
Thanks for reading everyone!
