Summarizing some relevant factors from my personal life, and how Unturned will be affected going forward.
Back in early January of this year, some repressed childhood trauma resurfaced. Over the past several months more details have slowly come to light. It seems that I have large memory gaps until 2017-2018 when I moved out on my own, and my memory gradually improves from then onward. Initially I had hoped to share more info in this post, but now is not the time yet.
Trying to process everything that is coming up has been a big focus of the year so far. I have seen a few therapists over this period – up to about a dozen sessions now. Looking ahead I think it will be a net positive, and I am optimistic for improving mental health to benefit gamedev. That being said, I think that in order to streamline the “work” side of life for increased “personal” side I need to cut everything back to only developing Unturned. (3.0)
I imagine this sounds alarming like “uh oh Unturned dead game!” To the contrary, I hope to bring many of the Unturned II (4.0) goals back to the original project. Even in the last couple years this started happening in the original as I experimented with taking the sequel in its own unique/differentiated direction, and I would like to bring some of these gameplay experiments back as well. Almost anything should be possible with enough work e.g. improved vehicle physics, deeper gunplay, better inventory, further mod support, new enemies, etc. (However splitscreen is unlikely.) And despite the problems in my personal life recently, I feel that the Unturned (3.0) updates have been quite successful. This coming Friday has a fairly major update too!
For what it is worth: I am deeply sorry for disappointing you repeatedly with Unturned II (4.0). It was irresponsible of me build excitement and hype so early in its life when I thought a beta release would be “soon.” (Yikes 4 years ago now…) When/if I resume development, I do not intend to post about it until/unless I have a concrete plan and release date that I can 100% guarantee commitment to. I hope that I can somewhat make it up to you in the meantime by doing my best to help Unturned (3.0) live up to its full potential.