Merry Christmas & Outlook for 2022
Merry Christmas! We’re back with our annual update post and outlook for the upcoming year. I still remember writing this post last year, when things looked honestly different for us than they do now.
Our year, 2021, began just like 2020 ended – with demotivation for the project and not much ambition to continue here due to stagnating player numbers and a majority of the community moving to TM2020. We announced that we would like to finish Trackmania One – Bay in 2021 and at least provide the blocks we worked on so hard. Just stopping at this point would have been a waste of work since we began in March 2019(!) already.
In January, a sudden wave of motivation hit us and we began to pick up our work on Bay – not just to finish and release it but to make it our own playground and express our creative ideas. “Bay Urban” was born, a remaster of the remaster. The first ideas were to just add more city decoration as we felt Bay originally lacked that. Quickly, the list of ideas grew to an unimaginable amount and we began slowly adding blocks the community always wanted and incorporating entirely new block sets and visual possibilities. I’m not going to sum up our whole Bay work here cause you will see it soon enough yourself. This environment is our most ambitious sub-project and it will be by far one of the biggest community releases ManiaPlanet has ever faced. We reached a quality level that can be partly compared to Nadeo’s and I am super glad about that.
Generally speaking, 2021 has been a very important year for us. We finally had the chance to re-brand in March which is an important step towards a proper identity. Additionally, we planned many things regarding promotion, community events and additional merch (we recently started selling own 3D print designs!!). As you might have noticed, since January we never stopped informing you and teasing our work – and we will continue to do so until the end!
We made promises over promises about possible beta- and release-dates but I am confident to say that Q2-Q3 2022 is a realistic time frame to get our work finished. As for the beta, which is essentially a beta v2 as we had some tests in mid 2020 already, we aim for February and at the same time to get campaigns started.
All of this work would have not been possible without the awesome people from unbitn as well as our artists, skinners and all the donators who kept supporting us monthly. Last but not least, you are an awesome and loyal community and we can’t wait to give you back what you deserve for being here with us.
This year we also got asked many times what will happen when Bay is finally released. Currently we do not have plans to continue with new environments (our schedule would be Coast & Rally next; no Island). This due to my own personal plans and goals and the decreasing player base in ManiaPlanet. However, I do have hope that we might be able to revive Trackmania One and continue our work somewhere else later – but that is on Nadeo.
We’ll continue to live our vision this upcoming year and prepare awesome things for the community. Next to Bay, we’re preparing another cool perk for Patreon donators as well as working on a big global update for Speed and Alpine with an entirely new menu UI and possibilities! More about that later.
What can you do for 2022? Spread our word!! We’d appreciate as much support as possible, so feel free to share our work with people who might have not heard about our project before.
Now have some relaxing holidays, stay away from Corona and come back strong in 2022!
– florenzius on behalf of UNBITN
