It’s not better down where it’s wetter
Frictional Games’ latest release, the underwater horror game SOMA, is nearly content complete.
In a post made on its Facebook page, Frictional explained that in the next week, the game will have all of the major content developed for it, meaning the rest of the process will be focused on bug testing, polishing, and optimising:
Next week will be the last one before the games goes into Content Lock. After this, no new non-trivial content can be added to the game. Instead, all efforts will solely focus on bug fixing, tweaking details and low-level optimization. Having this kind of lock is vital as things that might seem really simple additions could have ramifications that cause all sort of unforeseen consequences. In the final weeks leading up to release, you want to make sure that you only fix issues and not cause new ones.
Because of this, work has been extra gruelling the last few weeks as everyone wants to add their final stuff before we reach the point when this is impossible. Things are looking really good though, and we should basically have every single bit of content in the game by now. This means that next week will act more as a buffer zone in case something unexpected shows up, instead of a frantic race against time.
It’s nice to see some efforts being made by a developer to dampen the blow of the infamous crunch time. Plus it’s reassuring to know they’ve got the best part of a month (or at least until the game goes gold) to polish and improve what’s already there.
For some weird reason, this Facebook post has made me excited for SOMA than any trailer or screenshot could.
