BARS Progress

Hey everyone, hope you're doing well.

It's been almost two months since we've posted any news about BARS. If you haven't yet read BARS — An Introduction, we highly suggest you have a look at that before reading this statement.

A lot of progress was made on the project since the 2nd of July, particularly on character models, storage systems, animation, and for the last half-week or so, NPC AI. Last night was particularly tough, as we were configuring pathfinding for lockdown, something we've never done before, but managed to complete after seven hours and many unexpected and difficult-to-resolve issues.

Unlike our previous games, NPCs in BARS will be much smarter. Instead of roaming around aimlessly and occasionally targeting the player if they cross their path, NPCs in BARS will react differently depending on the time, with a pathfinding system developed from the ground up for certain parts of the day, where inmates know exactly where to go to get to their cells once lockdown begins and where to go for headcount. No code or pathfinding algorithms were sourced from others, as although this could speed up development, it reduces the amount of control we have over our code and could have even backfired and resulted in even longer development times if it were to go wrong. NPCs will also interact with each other, go through doors, interact with objects in their cell, and approach the player either to fight or trade.

A target release date was set on the 2nd of July 2026 and is still accurate as of writing this statement. It still falls within the published estimated release period of H1 2027, however it's too early to confirm whether this target is achievable, so we won't announce the exact release date yet, but what we will reveal is we are trying to publish this game shortly before EBJB Games' 5-year anniversary. At this momentum, we think this target will be achievable, and the game won't have to be delayed. The final release date will be revealed once the trailer is published.

It's now been over half a year since development began. We understand that this has been a long wait with very little publicised information, however much of this time has not been spent developing BARS. This project, so far, has had two major periods of inactivity / minimal activity: the first being from the 31st of January 2026 to the 1st of May 2026, and the second being from the 1st of June 2026 to the 2nd of July 2026. In both instances, we had to either stop developing or spend little time developing the game due to important real-life circumstances largely outside of our control, where we had to prioritise dealing with those situations over developing BARS. In fact, the whole reason we made Dead End Targets was because by mid-June we realised that this project will take a very long time to complete, so we wanted to give you something to play around with while you wait. But now we are back, and development will likely continue uninterrupted until at least September 2026, where by then, we would have hopefully implemented most of the game's major systems. Periods of inactivity do not necessarily mean the project is temporarily abandoned, it just means we can't work on major systems like NPCs or inventory systems, but smaller things like quick spritework or small bug fixes can still be done if time can be found for it.

We tend to have a habit of staying quiet until we're nearing the game's release, something we've done for pretty much every project since Dead End, which isn't a great strategy for an indie developer, so from now on we'll try to update you on the development process without revealing too much information, and hopefully get you more and more excited to play with each new statement. Don't expect weekly or fortnightly statements, but hopefully we won't take too long until our next statement. As usual, we post announcements and news on our socials first.