Dear gamers,
When I originally started writing these blog posts, I made an initial plan for about 48 blog posts. At the beginning of the year, we thought we’d release the game in December. We knew what features we wanted. The start of the year was looking good for us. Nobody was expecting the Spanish Inquisition.
Then the fire nation attacked.
From March 17th, due to the Covid-19 induced lockdown, we were all working from home. We thought it might just last a few months. We were -oh- so wrong.
From our perspective, as a small team of 9 people (give or take a few over the course of the year), working from home is a huge impairment to communication and decision making. We were used to working from a single room in the office. When we needed to discuss something, we could do it by just turning in our chairs. Ideas were free-flowing since everyone could hear everything in the room. Showing somebody something on the screen was much easier in person. Working from home added a large aspect of friction to that. While we can still communicate via voice chat and screen share, the fact is that the friction is still there in the form of the time delay from when you want to start the communication to the point when the communication actually starts. Not to mention it’s much more useful to see the person talking because body language and body cues are important when humans communicate.
All this to say: we were slowed down. We were also preparing builds for festivals on multiple occasions. While this was very beneficial to us (by getting useful feedback from the general public), it also meant we were working on a demo version of the game instead of the full version (from a code perspective). Some things had to be disabled, other things had to be excluded from the game, and we were making a tradeoff: invest time making sure the demo is properly limited instead of working on the shipping version. Not that it’s a huge time tradeoff, as some aspects of the demo are just part of the shipping version, but the time investment is real. It accumulates with the time wasted initiating communication between us.
We discussed the planned December release. We could release the game if we rushed the rest of the content for the game. It would not be polished, it would be buggy, but we could do it.
We decided against it.
We’re pushing back the release to Q2 2021, most likely spring. We have a project chart timeline which puts us at around that time. This includes all the polish and initial balance and testing and stuffs. Since we got a smidgeon better at the whole work-from-home situation, we feel this is a pretty good estimate. Everyone who played the demo can probably attest that the game is almost there, but we still need a bit more time to add the sparkles, the glitter, the shine. We’re updating the store page as well to show the approximate release date.
For a final thought, it’s Wednesday, my dudes.
Thanks for reading. Come voice your sadness and anger about the pushed release on our Discord server. I provide free virtual hugs.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/