Year One

It's been a whole year since we entered Early Access. We released into Early Access on October 24th, 2025, after three long years in part-time development; we weren't sure what was going to happen. When we started the project in Spring 2022, we definitely didn't expect it to get this big.

We were half thinking that we were going to get slammed by reviews and that players would hate our game. As game developers, it's often difficult to figure out what players really think of your work. There's a thousand different opinions coming at you from all directions. As a player, it's also difficult to figure out what the developers are thinking or doing. Do they read about your issues? Do the developers read the Discord? Do we pop on the VEIN subreddit or scan Steam forums sometimes? (The answer is of course yes.)

When we started the project in 2022, we made a commitment to read everything as best as we can; in the first month of VEIN's development we might have had 50 people in the Discord server, and now there's 36,783 as of this writing. That makes it a bit hard to continue with that, but thankfully there's more of us now to parse feedback, and we do what we can. This game was developed adjacent to the community, and we wouldn't be here without that; we have no plans on changing that, either.

Thankfully, you guys seem to like the game! Or, at the bare minimum, enjoy the foundation. Our reviews are pretty decent on Steam; the majority of our incoming criticism is fair and balanced, and we generally receive complaints and praise that seem reasonable. We're at this inflection point that survival games commonly get to: we have a base for a survival game here that has some soul. How do we now get the game elevated to becoming our dream survival game?

We're aware of the game's outstanding issues: our character and zombie models look like putty, our netcode is poor, there are performance problems, there's not much late-game stuff to do, and AI has frequent brain lapses. We've made strides toward sorting this stuff out over the last year, but we still have a lot of work to do.

We're also aware of some of our more hotly requested features. Gamepad support, lore and story, modding support, more base defenses and vehicle fortification, NPCs, and better zombie hordes/zombies in general come up again and again. These are big features, and we want to put a heavier focus on the bugs and issues first. However, we will continue working on smaller features in between.

We thought it might be fun to do a year in review just to look back at what happened since launch.

Year In Review

We launched October 24th. The first few months were pretty insane for us, because we had to fix bugs people were finding, while also setting up legal/banking/accounting. Steam releases funds at the end of the month after sales, so we had no money until December despite releasing late October.

0.022

We released a total of 18 hotfixes for 0.022, which is the launch version. Most were in the first few weeks, but were as late as January. Fixes included:

• Being able to push RVs while inside of them
• Being able to damage players that are loading
• Multiplayer crashes caused by other players (failing a code lock crashed everyone), exploit fixes, extremely long taser range, etc.
• Doubled cabins overlapping each other
• Antibiotics making you more instead of less likely to get bacterial illness
• ID cards giving screws, soil dismantling into plastic
• Connecting via Steam Friends not working
• Sinks wired into fuse boxes instead of water pumps
• Getting 1.2 million Vitality XP by detonating a firework in your inventory
• Prevent furniture respawning instantly with a UC nearby

In December we updated to Unreal 5.6. That was a mistake. It broke save games because in 5.6 Epic changed the format of path names for actors in the world. We scrambled to fix it, but ended up rewriting the entire save system to no longer depend on these a few months later, so they won't break in the future.

Around mid December, Yan joined us to help as a second programmer.

0.023

After the final hotfix in late January, we got down to business with new features and released 0.023 in early March, a month and a half later. We added some tangential features: the HTTP API received some updates for server hosts, zombie spawn changes were implemented to prevent them spawning in buildings, a new hunting menu was added, thermostats and HVAC were added to the game, foliage art was replaced with upgraded versions, vehicle hitching was added, and as usual, general rebalancing.

Over that month, four hotfixes were released. Fixes included:

• Text and UI issues
• Reverted the new save game location for dedicated servers from AppData back to the main directory. It turns out many server hosts don't allow reading from that directory
• Added some accessibility preference settings such as disabling self-harm references
• Tweaked weights (an empty bottle of fabric softener weighed 2kg)
• Fixed some settings not saving, etc.

By May, the new save system mentioned above was ready for integration.

Also around this time, we started growing the team, because we now had access to money from Steam. Ani joined and helped out for a bit with weapon animations. Noname came on board to help out with QA and bug testing. Skyler joined the team to start work on our new character and zombie models and art.

0.024

In late May, we released 0.024, which included the new Franklin County area, spawnable containers and furniture in the admin menu, sub-inventories and pseudo-stacking for better inventory management, plantable trees and foraging, extension ports, and more general rebalancing and fixes. It also included the new save system, which was faster and leaner while being less error-prone.

Eight hotfixes were released through the end of August. Fixes included:

• Issues with furniture detaching from vehicles
• Plants spontaneously reviving
• Vehicles falling through the ground
• Being subjected to other players' dreams
• Code lock abuse in multiplayer
• Improved networking and server performance
• Mod detection and warnings for if you're running them
• Balancing for electrical items
• Glasses and hats floating above zombie corpses you've decapitated

In April, 8z joined the team as our third programmer, Astro joined to help with rigging Skyler's character model, and Boon joined to help with weapon animation work.

0.025

Finally, about a month ago, we released 0.025. It extended Franklin County north, added new animations, more buildable parts for your base, optimization, work-in-progress building maintenance, inspecting weapons & animations for a bunch of weapons, and more.

We're getting better at hotfixing and only had to release three hotfixes so far, mostly for minor issues like missing parts of the map, some crafting-loop duplication exploits, and balance changes, like increasing the size of buildable storage to match the increases in weights of some crafting items. The last hotfix update was 9 days ago.

Adam and Anton both recently joined to work on 3D art and placeholder replacements, so we can get rid of some of that damned taped grey box. Astro and Boon both joined us full-time as well.

And that brings us to today! We're much more confident in the future of VEIN than we were a year ago. We're continuing to expand the team to fill in for roles we need, and working towards getting the game more stable and less janky.

What's next?

We don't usually talk about what we're doing next, as things come up or get delayed, and we don't want to build hype when it's not helpful to anyone. However, here's some things we've been working on for the next year of VEIN's development.

• All the art is finished for standalone buildables: you'll be able to build a house from scratch, in the middle of the forest if you so choose, and maintain and finish it. We're going to be programming in the system for this shortly.
• Controller support has been being worked on full-time for the last two weeks. It's been in a weird half-done state since launch. We want to get it in and squared away; ditto for Steam Deck support.
• We've been carefully profiling multiplayer performance and testing new multiplayer functionality in the aim of reducing bandwidth and improving performance as a server host.
• We've been integrating the new character art. Skyler has done a great job with the characters so far; they've finished 24 face presets, 4 skin tones, some base clothing, and a couple dozen new hair pieces. Astro's been rigging these (getting them ready to be in-game), and Kyle's been doing some code work to get them animating.
• We've been experimenting with rendering hordes of zombies at a time at a much larger scale than how zombies currently work, and have been in pre-production for a full rewrite of zombie spawning (so they don't spawn, they're just there).
• The Early Access map area (Lyon Mountain, Dannemora, and smaller towns in-between) have been re-detailed to bring them up to quality standards, and pre-production has started on the areas to the north of Lyon Mountain and to the south of Redford by Zoe.
• Zombie AI navigation has been being tweaked and modified so they properly path to noise and visuals.
• Work is continuing towards getting the full suite of weapons custom-animated (and replaced, if they're low-res enough) by Boon. An assortment of scopes, attachments, etc. have already been added by 8z.

All this said, we are putting an emphasis on bugs and performance for the next little while, but that's much less colorful to read.

And of course, we continue to accept resumes and portfolios at jobs@ramjetstudios.com, if you feel so inclined (if you've sent one in already, don't worry, we have it!) – we're hiring programmers and UX designers right now.

We'd like to congratulate all 834,412 players for managing to kill 181,433,975 zombies despite only dying 2,588,096 times (so around 70 zombies per life). Not bad, even if 233,948 of you became zombies in the process.

We want to thank everyone who's played the game for your support. It's only because of you that we managed to get this far, and only because of you that we're able to keep making this game as good as it can be.

Here's to another year of VEIN's development!