It's been a long few months. The short version of "What's been happening?" is that we had a few setbacks but are back on track now.
The long version is: our initial release plan was to enact a code freeze by the end of December, and have the public demo released at the end of January. The code freeze at the end of December went off without a hitch, we got in all the features we wanted to have for the public demo, and squashed all the major game breaking and stopping bugs. We sat down for a meeting and discussed all the things that needed to be in place for the January launch, and the only significant stopping point was a launch website.
Shortly into the development of the launch website (pictured left in it's current form) the lead developer of SCS had to step away from the project for several weeks due to a loss in their family. The web page that they were developing had been written in Jade, which no one else on the team had any familiarity with to be able to continue the work, so in their absence we brought on a new web developer to continue working on the launch website.
The new site (pictured to the right in its current form) was progressing well and had several changes from the original design that we felt improved the flow and layout, however disaster struck a second time when the developer working on it had their computer's hard drive fail. While none of the development files were lost thanks to backups, the developer was no longer in a position to continue the development for the next few weeks either as they had to take their computer in for repair and had other responsibilities that this loss impacted.
At this point, it was now around the beginning of April. No additions to SCS codebase had occurred since December since that was the stable build we intended to launch to the public, and we were no closer to a stable launch website. The lead developer had returned to the project by this point but the many delays and setbacks had taken their toll on moral. The decision was made to ax the idea of a launch website entirely, and instead re-purpose our dev blog into the launch website.
You may have seen the changes occurring to the dev blog gradually over the last few weeks as it has grown in-line with the appearance of the second website design. Additionally, given how long it's been since December, we felt like the game was no longer in the release state people would expect it to be in after how much time had passed, so development on the game has resumed, starting with the inclusion of Air and Sea units in the public demo!
Starting from now, we're gearing back up our public face to be more active here on the blog, Twitter, Reddit, and making a second big push towards the release of the Public Demo. The tentative release schedule is to have Air and Sea bug-free and balanced by the end of May, to take that build and get it uploaded and vetted on the hosting platform we choose to use, get advance preview links out to journalists and reviewers to get their opinion on the state of the game ultimately for a June/July demo release to the entire public.
No comments:
Post a Comment