100,000 Hikers have officially signed up to explore The Gold River!

We are absolutely blown away by all of your support. We are so thankful for all of you. We wouldn't be here without you.

While we celebrate this milestone, we're still focused on finished the game for Early Access. It's been a long month of polish as we continue to fix bugs, make improvements, and optimize and there is plenty of work still ahead of us! We've made some big strides, including in the increased issues for AMD users we've been hearing lately and your feedback has been and continues to be a great help!

As always, thank you for everything and we look forward to getting to update you more soon!
Happy Hiking!

Hello Hikers!

We talked with Epic! This was absolutely monumental for us as a small team to have this opportunity with some very experienced Unreal Engine 5 developers.

We sent them some files (a lot of files) a while ago and on our recent call they had prepared a very in depth document of their findings. We're not going to get super nitty gritty here but we definitely want to provide an overview in the areas they flagged. More information will come in a standalone performance post soon.

Keep in mind that although some of the advice we got was absolutely amazing, not everything fits with how we've "made the game" - There are also some engine limitations on systems that just needs more love from Epic themself too.

Let's get straight to it! So, Unreal Engine 5 measures frame time in milliseconds (ms). Frame time is how long it takes the engine to render a single frame.

- Lower frame time (fewer ms per frame) = higher FPS

- Higher frame time (more ms per frame) = lower FPS

Every single system in the game adds to the overall millisecond count, which is why continually optimizing is so important. Alongside bug fixes we've also added way way way more to the FALL portion of the map as well as adding more to systems we already have. We've managed to stay at the same FPS and for many users we have also significantly lowered the time it takes to load into the game and increased FPS.

These are some of the areas where we received feedback:

- World

- Physics

- Slate (UI related) - Finished

- Non-nanite shadow maps - Finished

- Skeletal meshes - Finished

- Fans (Substation fans) - Finished

- GPU primitives

- Garbage collection

- Actor spawning hitch

- Raytracing

- Shadows - Finished

- Shadow VRAM - Finished

- Volumetric fog - Finished

- Lumen - Finished

- Nanite - Finished

- Non-nanite - Finished

To round this off, although we did not go into more detail or talk about how many milliseconds these systems added / has helped on our end we do want to mention again that there is still a lot of communicating back and fourth with EPIC. They've been really awesome about all this. What we have finished now are what we call "low hanging fruit", this is what we could get done since we talked with Epic. The remaining key points here are all massive amounts of work that we have to balance between building the map further, fixing bugs, developing new features and more.

Our goal as a team is and will always be to continue being as transparent as we can be with our community. Without you, we would not be in this position.

The work continues, talk soon!

Hello Hikers! Another month finished, time for another Fireside Chat!

August FLEW by so quick it was actually a bit scary. We started this month off with our first of many tutorial videos! We aim to cover all the essential systems we have implemented and we've already completed 2 videos. More to come soon! I know we mention this a lot, but as a small team we have to maintain a fine balance so these videos will take a bit of time.

Another exciting update on our end is we did talk to EPIC! We had a long call with them talking about everything related to optimization. We've received extensive documentation and we'll cover more about this soon.

We will also address the elephant in the room, which is both "when is the next DEMO update" and "When is the game releasing". We're implementing our new MULTIPLAYER system which offers a new way to create a lobby and then join the game as a lobby. This new system makes sure that once the HOST is fully loaded in, all other players in the lobby will start loading in. We're also neck deep in optimization work, with all the help from EPIC we've found a lot that we've already optimized and we have a ton more in the works. We're also building out FALL, squashing bugs and working on new features. Again, as a small team this is a lot to balance, but we're doing the best we can.

"When will the game be released?" - We will have more in depth information on this very soon, our goal is the get this game to be playable for as many people as possible, and with this help from EPIC we are making strides towards that.

What we want as a studio is to continue being transparent with you, our amazing community. We see the feedback, we see all the love you send our way and we see that we've got a great game on our hands here. Great games get one chance to prove they're great, and we aim to come out as solid as we can with an extensive plan on what we're doing AFTER Early Access launch.

That was all for this monthly Fireside Chat, talk more soon!

We're going to need a bigger tent!

Since January, we've gone from 6k to 90k Wishlists and 103k Demo Downloads since June's Demo Release. You Hikers are beyond amazing! This has truly been a wild journey so far and we could not be more thankful for all of you. We're still hard at work on optimization, bug fixes, and expansion for Early Access and continue to appreciate all your feedback and support. We'll continue to keep you all up to date!

See you on the trail!

Hello hello, Hikers!

It’s the end of the month and time for a new community update and this time with a new name. Welcome to the monthly Fireside Chat!

First and foremost, we want to thank everyone again for the continued support and feedback. We say it all the time but we mean it every time. Because of you, we’ve hit so many exciting milestones and we can’t wait to reach more with you!

This past month has been another busy month of patches on the Demo and our push toward Early Access! While we’ve got a lot done, there is still a lot more we’re continuing to work through and as always, we’ll keep you updated here as well as Discord[discord.gg] and Trello[trello.com].

We also wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves. We often mention that Fairview Games is a core team of 6 but we haven’t talked about WHO Fairview Games is. So without further ado, meet the core Fairview Games team!

Craig Martin - Co-Founder, Lead Engineer

While many of you may know Craig for his “excellent” navigation skills, he is also one of the Co-Founders of Fairview Games and Lead Engineer on The Gold River Project. You got a bug? Craig can fix it!

David Parkes - Co-Founder, Lead Game Design

Known by many in the community as the guy with the voice of a radio host, Dave is the other Co-Founder of Fairview Games and Lead Game Design on The Gold River Project! The beautiful world many of you have experienced is in large part from the mind of Dave!

Stephen Parkes - Lead Art Design

Dave’s equally creative brother, Steve, is another HUGE part of the beauty of the world of The Gold River Project as Lead Art Design! In addition to the beautiful landscapes in game, you can find his work in other designs such as the game’s logo and Steam cover art!

Bobby Hughes - Lead Technical Artist

Some of you may know Bobby from our Dev Livestreams as Craig’s Camp parent. When he’s not wrangling Craig on the trail, Bobby spends his time helping Craig wrangle bugs and implement fun new systems in the game. Without Bobby, we wouldn’t have cool systems like Farming!

Joakim Elseberg - Community Management

The King of Discord! Joakim, or as you all know him, Jokka, is a Community Manager for The Gold River Project. He’s often found in Discord and post replies helping out our community in whatever way he can! He is a real Mensch.

Samantha Nye - Marketing and Community Management

The narrator of this post! I work alongside Jokka on Community and social media stuff as well as general Marketing for The Gold River Project. I do a lot of work behind the scenes but you can also find me on Discord, our Social Media, and here on Steam!

Being a small team, in addition to our primary roles, we all wear many hats. Making a game is a team effort and this team, frankly, is having a lot of fun making it and we’re really excited to see where the trail we’re on with this takes us. Until next time!

Happy Hiking!

Hello hello, Hikers!

Another patch is live! Here are the fixes we have for you in the latest update:

Fixes

• More optimization on Sub Stations

• Updated security camera for accuracy

• Fixed replication bug of float plane intro with clients

• Fixed vaulting bug, no longer defaulting to 0,0,0 if ground trace fails

• Virtual texture setup for Fall

Thank you for your continued feedback! We'll let you know when the next update is ready :).

Hello Hikers!

Last time we touched on this about a month ago, we were at 36 000 Wishlists and 29 000 DEMO downloads, absolutely insane numbers.

Now with Steam Summer Sale ending and Wishlists being available to view again, we are at an astonishing 85,000 Wishlists and 95,000 DEMO downloads. To say we are overwhelmed and completely blown away by these numbers would be an understatement. We are so incredibly lucky to have the amazing community we have, we see your feedback and we're trying our best to make the most enjoyable game possible for you all.

A simple "Thank you" is not enough, but we truly mean it from the bottom of our hearts. Here is to an amazing future for The Gold River Project!

- The Fairview Games Team

Happy Monday, Hikers! We have a small hot fix ready for you today! Here is what's inside:
Fixes

• Added a check, if player is on ladder and selects Unstuck, climbing is turned off and then player teleported.

• Fixed peppermint seeds inspection bug - now you see the peppermint seeds

• Main map clean up. Close lab doors, removed test tent. Fixed floating ferns, clipping box by cabin, PC audio added to Perimeter Control room

Thank you everyone for the feedback! Happy Hiking!

Hello hello, Hikers!
Another patch is now live! Here is what we have ready for you this patch:

Fixes

• Removed double blast doors in SS2

• Added arrow decals on pips in SS2

• Fixed BP references in SS2

• Added a check for the summer perimeter control center button - you have to be in Summer to interact. Takes care of players spamming into winter.

• Fixed the animations on the throwing wrench. Now with less sashaying.

• Changed the name to 'Attach' on the SS emergency override

• Various SS2 edits and clean ups for optimization

• Fix - if swimming and then click 'Unstuck' you will stop swimming

A lot of fixes to Substations this time! Let us know what you think!