Last week saw the release of the first footage of Championship Wrestling Promoter in action with the debut trailer. If you haven’t watched it yet please check it out! CWP has been in development since early in 2020, and I’ve shown off bits of the game here and there while working on it, but they’ve all had placeholder art, incomplete designs, etc. The game is at a point where a lot of the design is locked in, and even more importantly, the art for the game is essentially finished. What CWP looks like now is what it will look like when the game is released. There’s lots of work left to do, but CWP finally looks and plays like the vision I had in my head when I first started working on the game, which made this a good time to start showing it off.
Having reached this point, the question I’ve been getting the most is, “When can I play it?” In this post I’m going to give a tentative timeline that I’m currently aiming for. This could change at any point, but the game is far enough along now that giving rough estimates is possible.
Timeline
There are three key dates that I’m working towards right now.
LATE SUMMER - The goal is to run a closed beta this summer, likely towards the end of the summer. At this point the game will be essentially complete but will likely still have quite a few bugs and balance issues. The goal of the closed beta will be to gather feedback and bug reports to help make sure the game is as good as possible when the general public is able to play it later in the year.
OCTOBER - Steam will be running a Next Fest in October this year. I’m aiming towards having a largely finished and polished game at this point so that it can be part of Next Fest. This will be an open demo that anyone can play, and it will be a great opportunity to gather an even bigger pool of feedback in preparation for releasing the game.
LATE 2022 - If everything goes according to plan, following the closed beta and the public demo, one last batch of fixes and updates should see Championship Wrestling Promoter finished and ready for release before the year is done. This is not a promise or a release date announcement, it is an internal goal. It’s possible that the game will slip into 2023, but I’d love to get the game into your hands before Christmas.
The road ahead
So what is left to complete in order to get to the finish line? The main thing is content, balance, and bug fixing. The primary systems in the game have all been created, aside from AI, which is mostly done but not quite there yet. But there are many aspects of the game that need some reworking, and one part of the game that is likely going to be significantly overhauled soon (scouting). Some systems work in a general sense, but have details that need work.
The game also still needs a lot of content, and when I say “content” I mostly mean text. Because every match and promo is described in the game, and because you’ll hopefully want to play through hundreds of shows, there has to be a good amount of variety to how things play out. Promos, in particular, just don’t have enough variety right now. Other kinds of content that need to be expanded include the unique and random elements like character traits and random events.
And finally, the game just needs more polish and a lot of bug fixing. There are many little details that need to be taken care of before asking people to pay money for a game, and those can take several months even when the game is largely complete.
So that’s what it’s going to take to get the game out, and when I hope it happens. Thanks to everyone who’s supported us so far, and hopefully it won’t be too much longer before the game is ready for you to play.