'Single-player Tarkov' Road to Vostok's solo dev admits its huge popularity is "running away from me," but he has a plan

Having a successful launch as an indie developer is the moment where you get to breathe a sigh of relief, but it also comes with problems – especially if you’re primarily working alone. Road to Vostok is a brutal survival shooter with permadeath, has heavy Escape From Tarkov and Stalker vibes, and it comes from Finish soldier turned solo dev Antti Leinonen. Five days on from its launch, he reveals that its “extremely successful” start has “secured the entire development roadmap,” but admits that he’s been overwhelmed by the flood of responses from players. Fortunately, he’s already taking a healthy approach to his future plans.

While he has employed some contractors along the way, Leinonen mostly operates as a solo developer, and he admits that this “has many perks and benefits, but also a lot of limitations when it comes to things like launching your game to a semi-large audience.” He reveals that Road to Vostok has already sold approximately 140,000 copies, with an average daily active user count for the survival game of more than 25,000.

“Thank you to all who have purchased the game and trusted me as a developer,” Leinonen writes. “I will do my very best to make sure that these resources from the launch are being utilized in a responsible and smart way.” It’s likely that the first port of call here will be in hiring some additional help, because his biggest problem now is an ever-growing stack of over 11,000 unread emails that are arriving faster than he can respond to them.

“Most of my communication channels are pretty much ‘running away from me,'” Leinonen continues. “The most logical solution to this problem is that I start hiring some additional help, but unfortunately that option becomes available only next month when I can start utilizing these funds from the launch.

“This being said, if you have sent a bug report or tried to contact me, there’s a high chance I haven’t managed to answer yet (sorry for that), but hopefully you understand the one-human limitation there.” Leinonen notes that “some of this information flood is linked to key-request bots, but they are really difficult to filter out completely, and since this was my first time launching a game I had no prior knowledge of how to prepare for those.”

Despite this struggle, Leinonen says, “I’m really happy with how the launch is going and seeing people enjoying the game. I think that I managed to find a good price point (and launch date) for the release that is fair and aligned with the current feature set. I also think the game launched at a good state for an early access title; consider the response and how I feared those hardware-related launch issues, which turned out to be really minimal in the large picture.”

Leinon says he’s “already tempted to start making hotfixes and tweaks,” but he’s made the decision to hold off for a short while before doing so, to ensure he isn’t “working under heavy load and a ‘foggy’ mental state.” He explains, “Getting to early access required pretty insane work hours and stuff that I would not recommend for others, but I made those decisions since I wanted to give this product the best chance for launch, and I hope the effort shows in game.

“How is this related to hotfixes? Well, based on my prior experience, if you start making tweaks and especially code changes under this heavy load, you can easily fix one thing, but you accidentally create two new problems or some unexpected issues when you are not running on 100% mental clarity. Since the game is performing really well on Steam and works like intended for the majority of the players, I really don’t want to screw things up by making accidental mistakes.”

Leinonen concludes that taking a period of “initial personal recovery” before diving back into the code “is the most reasonable and wise thing to do.” I’m glad to hear him making that decision, which sounds like a completely fair move that will be better for the long-term health of Road to Vostok’s development.

“Of course for someone who is trying to launch the game and experiences a crah, you want that hotfix ASAP,” Leinonen acknowledges, “but since this project still relies on one full-time developer, we want to keep that one developer in working condition for many years to come.” He says he has been watching a lot of gameplay and already has a good plan for what he wants to prioritize in the first hotfix.

Leinonen estimates it will take “around one more week once I have caught up with all the bug reports” for him to start implementing hotfixes. Once that’s done, however, he’s “going to take a proper break from the development (never had that in four years)” before starting work on Build Two, which will include an overhaul to enemy AI and the next major additions to the game. With four years of established demos and progress under his belt to date, I’d say Leinonen has earned that holiday, and hopefully it sets up a promising future for Road to Vostok.