FINALLY!! :D
More than two years after we started trying to get this license, today we are finally launching Othello to the world on Steam!
We can't thank you all enough, for all of the support! The community has been great at making our previous releases successful, helping us tune the AI to the right level of difficulty, and helping us find bugs in prior releases so that the game would be good enough that we would get the approval to bring the Othello IP back to PC for the first time in years (decades?)!
This launch comes with many fixes since the last version was pushed (listed way down below).
Also, a big heartfelt thanks to Othello World Champion, Ben Seeley and to Benkt Steentoft of the World Othello Foundation. Without their help, I never would have been able to navigate the tricky licensing situation and been able to capitalize on contacting Megahouse for a license, literally the same day they announced that they'd obtained the global rights.
As a final note, we'd like to dedicate this launch to Goro Hasegawa (Satoshi Hasegawa) who originally patented this game in Japan back in 1971 and passed away this summer at the age of 83. Through his many years of work, along with his American counterpart James R. Becker, this great game and its community were built into a household staple and a globally-recognized source of endless fun.
A minute to learn... a lifetime to master.
Thank you,
- Sean Colombo & Geoff Brown (BlueLine Game Studios)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/307430
Updates since last build:
- Bugfix: The buttons for the second-player in a Lobby had regressed to not be mouse-clickable anymore (hotkeys still worked). Thanks dani_as0 and bentley_maniac for the reports.
- Fixed regression that was causing log-spam of loading SDF fonts.
- Fixed the occasional crash on Mac/Linux that occurred especially when entering the Online Game Menu screen very quickly after starting the program.
- Fixed a recently-developed crash when opening the Steam Overlay (eg: for Leaderboard or Achievements) in OSX.
- Fixed the case where you Leave a game during LoadingFromServer, then started another game (eg: local, or just a NEW online game) and the game thought it was still loading from server... forever.
- Fixed game-reconnections (if it says "Loading from game server..." at any point during a game, now it should succeed again. That was broken for a while... we just didn't notice because that only happens in weird cases anyway).
- Fixed the use-case where a host starts a game asynchronously with the opponent moving first, then a guest joins and makes a play, then the host would previously freeze in "Loading game from server...". Creating async games and having the opponent move should be fine now.
- Game warned "this game is rated" when forfeiting, even if it was not rated.
- Mac: fixed crashing that would happen in various versions of OS X on various machines. It was due to several versions of Mono crashing in different ways on different versions. We found an old version that works consistently.
- All users who owned this game under its previous name will be automatically upgraded and will keep ALL of their progress, stats, achievements, etc.. Thank you for being early adopters!
