When I launched the Indiegogo campaign to fund KeeperRL nine years ago, I promised a 1.0 release by the end of 2014. This kinda didn’t happen, but I’ve always been committed to hitting that milestone some day. It’s just that I never felt it was the right time for it. Well that time is finally coming, and I will explain the reasoning behind my decision.

The way I see KeeperRL is, first and foremost, as my job, as it has been my main source of income for the last eight years. Even though there have been swings in the sales, they’ve mostly been stable over the years, affording me a comfortable life. Looking at things financially, it was just a wise decision to keep working on it instead of moving on to something else.

On the other hand working on the same thing for so many years is very tiring, and can hinder your personal growth. I’ve been yearning to start fresh for a long time, and I envy other creative fields, where projects take months instead of years to finish. As some of you may know, I actually have started quite a few projects on the side, but they’ve been much smaller in scope and not really intended to make money.

The financial and creative components have more or less cancelled each other out, leading me to the deciding reason for KeeperRL’s long development time, which is that I’ve always felt it has a lot of unrealized potential. I’ve heard similar comments from many people over the years. Because I’m a very stubborn person with big dreams, I’ve kept going back to the drawing board looking for ways to improve the game and make it more enticing and replayable, aspiring to make it as good as some popular games in the genre, such as Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld.

In the last few months I’ve had some breakthrough ideas on how to improve KeeperRL, and their initial implementation has been very promising. With this in mind I’ve decided that the time to leave Early Access is now or never. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I need to put an end to my “one more feature” mindset and finally reach the goal or admit defeat. The second is that releasing major features in the 1.0 update is important for the game’s promotion, as it brings back old players, and catches the attention of press and influencers, hopefully leading to decent sales on launch day. And it’s unlikely that I’ll ever be able to put out as meaningful an update as this one.

With the big announcement out of the way, I’d like to add some caveats. First of all, I don’t intend to make the 1.0 update final, and it’s very likely that I’ll keep working on KeeperRL to some extent. Of course these won’t be big updates, because I will finally start maintaining save and mod compatibility. I’ll also be 100% committed to fixing bugs, performance, and other issues. The second caveat is that I still have no idea how long releasing the coming update will take, so there is no release date yet. Besides working on new gameplay, I also have to cross off things like proper sound effects, Steam achievements, hiring a marketing specialist, etc. It will very likely be 2024 before everything is done. It may be disappointing that there won’t be any (major) official patches out before then, but this is the way it has to be.

I’m going to write another post soon revealing all of really cool stuff that I have been working on. If you’re impatient, and would like to get more involved, I recommend popping in on Discord, where I often post updates and share development builds.