How’s it going, Valley Dwellers! Pond inhabitants? Tadpoles? Anyways, Jacob is off in Paris, so you’re stuck with old Wyatt this week.
What’d we do in February?
First off, I can’t believe February is already over. I feel like Jacob and I just published the last edition. February was a busy month for AFP, though! The team and I visited Champlain College and tabled for two days on campus to talk to students about Waterjacked and the studio. It was wonderful to see the whole team finally represent the work they’ve put so much effort into. Around 20 students played Waterjacked and provided feedback to us. The overall reception was positive, despite many bugs hampering the experience (oops).
We took the feedback from Champlain, implemented a lot of fixes, and, after much delay, released The Visibility Update! After the Steam NEXT Fest back in October, we wanted to hit the ground running with an ambitious update cycle. It was very unrealistic, and on top of the holidays, the update took longer than anticipated. However, that was a much-needed reality check.
Looking back, a lot of critical design questions were answered over the update’s development. Some game mechanics, such as how we wanted to manipulate stats, were still up in the air. A lot of answers were found for outstanding parts of the game, such as Augments. We also streamlined certain parts of the game, like how enemies work, and refactored some critical systems. These behind-the-scenes additions, despite not being visible (heh), were a key part of the Visibility Update.
Now we’re looking forward to the summer months. We initially wanted Waterjacked to be released by February (hah), and… well, that didn’t happen! Learning how long things take to reach a solid quality level has been a very difficult part of the development process. Instead of trying to continue to potshot release periods, we’re staying focused on the next immediate steps we can take to move the project forward. With that, let me cover the purpose of the updates we have planned for Waterjacked.
Waterjacked Updates
The Elephant Graveyard Update
The Elephant Graveyard’s focus is to expand the gameplay strategies available to Players through new Modules and Augments. We also want to diversify the kinds of situations Players will find themselves in with the addition of new enemies. At its current state, Waterjacked has just enough strategic choice to last you a fun ten(ish) minutes. It quickly falls flat with the lack of variance or build choices. There’s also the matter of an end goal (which we’ll talk about later in this post!). The difficulty of scenarios and their overall lack of design also contribute to this.
To solve these issues elegantly, we’ll be hosting playtesting sessions in our Discord! These playtests are free for anyone to participate in and will run for a whole weekend (Friday 5 PM PST to Sunday 9 PM PST). A beta branch will be made live on Steam, which will have the experimental features. All we ask is that you take some time to fill out a feedback form when you’re done playing. Playtests will be announced a week before we plan on hosting them across all our social channels.
For this month’s edition, I’d like to introduce two of the new enemies you’ll see in this update:
The Technomancer
The Technomancer is our first support(ish) unit. They have a unique pool of abilities they’ll use on their turn, which range from buffing the attack of fellow bots or debuffing the Player. Once they’ve used their ability enough, they get a little angry…
The Engineer
The Engibee is another disruptor-style enemy. Equipped with the full, unlimited power of the robot bureaucracy, the inspector can call in demolition strikes, blowing a hole in your plans! They can also interrupt your power plans, so tread carefully! We posted a voting contest on our Instagram, to which only one person voted. So shoutout to hexagreen6 for picking the concept of this robot!
Get ready to deal with these new threats when The Elephant Graveyard Update releases this summer!
The Prophecy Update
The update that finally, just maybe, will answer that question about what Waterjacked is all about. This is another stacked update featuring more enemies, more modules, and a super sick boss fight against The Prophet. We’re staying very tight-lipped about this part of the game as we are REALLY excited to share it with you all. The Prophecy Update is planned for Q3 of 2026 and will coincide with Waterjacked’s official release.
The Endless Update
Roguelikes are all about replayability. Right now, we’re developing Waterjacked’s campaign as we intend for it to be every player’s on-ramp for learning the game. Once you’ve beaten the campaign, you’ll unlock Endless Mode, which will feature scaling enemies that get harder the farther you progress. You’ll complete runs, finishing off each with a fight against an ever-more-powerful Prophet. How far will you go to purge the robot threat? You can expect the Endless Update in Q4 of 2026.
The ??? Update
Once we’re ready to move on from Waterjacked, we’ll come out with one more, super secret, update. That’s all you’re getting for now.
Our commitment to regular patches
As much as we loved working on the Visibility Update, we didn’t like how little of it you were getting to see or play. To remedy this, we’ve dedicated a portion of content and features to be shipped once they’re finished. These features range from improved animations, quality of life fixes, and other features that benefit from being in your hands as soon as possible. We’ll post sneak peeks and announce the mini-updates across our socials, so don’t worry about missing out. We hope this change allows you to feel more engaged in the development of Waterjacked and enjoy new content without such a ludicrous wait.
Rogue Bots!
Tomorrow, March 1st, Rogue Bots will kick off! Rogue Robots includes games that feature robots, AI, or any kind of mechanical being. The organizers didn’t specify what you had to be doing to them, and destroying bots is as good as anything, so we signed right up! We’re super excited to have this opportunity and hope it helps drive some traffic to Waterjacked and other interesting titles. Rogue Bots will run from March 1st to the 9th, and feature over 100+ games! You can find the event page by navigating to the Waterjacked Steam page and clicking the banner at the top, or directly to the festival page here. I’ll be making a separate post for Rogue Bots tomorrow, highlighting some interesting games!
Expos!
Outside of festivals, we’re also lucky enough to have the chance to attend some expos! In April, we’ll be attending VT Sci-Fi and Fantasy from the 25th to the 26th. This is right in our backyard, so we’re so excited to have a local expo to attend. We’ll be allowing attendees to playtest Waterjacked at our booth, so if you’re a local Vermonter, come by! You can find more info about VT Sci-Fi here! We’re looking to attend one more expo over the summer between June and August, and one more in the mid to late fall before winter hits. We have yet to select any, but will post once we have one locked in!
A teaser for a teaser
If you haven’t noticed, Waterjacked doesn’t have a trailer… for now! Behind the scenes, our very talented artist, Lucas, has been crunching away on a slick new animated trailer for Waterjacked. This was a big challenge for us, as we didn’t want to make a plain gameplay trailer. We wanted to assert ourselves as a studio that, despite our limited resources, will always strive to deliver interesting and engaging content. It’s been a lot of work, and it aggravates us that we can’t produce quadruple-A quality right out of the gate, but we’ll get there! We’ll be releasing a teaser trailer for Waterjacked very soon, so keep your eyes on the horizon, dwellers!
That’s a wrap!
This edition definitely doesn’t match up to all the cool stuff from the last edition, but I promise the next will cover more of the cool items coming in the Elephant Graveyard update. Remember to check out the Rogue Bots festival over the next week, and if you’re a Vermonter, come see us at VT Sci-Fi and Fantasy in April!
Until then,
Wyatt
