Episodic development
The second of our major announcements is that the game will be launched in episodes. The launch dates are to-be-announced, but after the first episode we're looking at a new launch every couple of months. We believe this makes it even easier to cooperate with our audience, since we can get feedback on our work between episodes and players who play the first episode are even better equipped to provide ideas and content for the following ones. As should go without saying, the story will still be branching and you will be able to have your character stats and decisions carry on from episode to episode.

Effects on storyline
This change was one of the motivating factors in the storyline rewrite I mentioned last time - cutting the same story in pieces wouldn't have made for a very balanced experience so it made sense to re-design it completely to suit an episodic structure.

The biggest change to the old plans is the unification of character storylines. Rather than three separate stories taking place isolated from the others as we originally planned, we're now crafting the character storylines into one branching tree in which all major (and several minor) decisions have an effect on the other characters' story progression. This was in fact something we opted not to do because things tend to get complex towards the end with so many factors, but with episodic development we'll have more time and resources to handle all the possible endgame branches.

We're aiming for a movie/novel -style handling of several perspectives, each characters' decisions having an effect on the others' storylines and where the characters' timelines are not in complete sync all of the time - Insider starts his story several days before the Unseen, Unseen a day or two before Soldier. Each episode will feature a piece of the story that alternates between the viewpoints of each of the characters. Since decisions made in earlier episodes also have a major influence on the following ones, so you may want to try out different paths while waiting for the next episode to come out. :)

Assembly Summer 2011
Last but not least for this update, Operation Highjump will be present at Assembly Summer 2011, 4th-7th August at Hartwall Areena in Helsinki.

Matti Delahay
Lead designer & Community manager
Operation Highjump