Hello Doppelgangers,
I've just landed back in England after our company work trip to attend Tokyo Game Show in Japan, and am sitting on the train to Bristol, writing this message. Some of the team already arrived back in the middle of last week and started working on fixing bugs. Currently it's our goal to have a patch out with bug fixes this week. If you've left or are thinking of leaving a negative review despite liking the game itself, I can make a promise to you right here, right now, that the bugs will be fixed, and the game that you like will still be there.
While leaving a negative review does make your frustrations clear, it also prevents us from having a good launch which puts our future as a Game Developer into uncertain territory, so I hope you can take into account the negative impact in our small Game Dev career that such reviews cause, and that we are doing our best to fix things.
Here is a current and updating list of fixes!
All of these issues will be addressed as soon as possible, with a priority focus on hard crashes and softlocks.
We have been working tirelessly on the game since June last year, and thanks to our Publisher Serenity Forge they have had a at least 1-2 QA people testing the game 2 days a week (and sometimes more) since then as well. Earlier on their work was focused towards verifying slices of the game as we completed milestones for submission, and later on the focus shifted towards testing the full game as well as making sure there were no lingering issues with equipment. There is a very significant amount of variation in the game, and in some cases bugs slipped through the net simply because of how difficult it is to test every possible variable between equipment, skill trees and class choices. In addition to this there was a bigger group focus test of the beginning of the game, and I've made multiple beta testing versions of the game available to Beta Backers of the Keylocker Kickstarter.
In April this year the team and I made the decision to attend Tokyo Game Show for the first time. We've attended Bitsummit in Kyoto two times prior, and events like these is one of the few times we get to actually meet in person and hang out, as we are spread all over the world. When we made that decision originally, the aim was to release the game in August, which would have given us time to attend to the launch before leaving for Japan. In the end we delayed the release to September 18, and on September 22nd, we left for Japan. I don't know how many of you reading this have attended these types of incredibly large public facing trade shows, but it's an experience as rewarding as it is draining, and by the end of the show, the end of September had come as well, and we were mentally and physically exhausted.
The next week was spent recuperating, doing things together as a group (we had not seen each other in over 2 years) and exploring Tokyo, and at the start of last week, the travel home began, with all the complications and wrinkles that multiple flights across the world can have. For example, traveling from Japan to Brazil takes at least 2 days and includes two absolutely brutal 14 hour flights in succession.
So, one by one the team has been reaching their homes, some with more difficulty than others, dealing with the jetlag of traveling across half the globe and getting back up to speed with the state of the game and other demands.
Last week I also received the final localizations for Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. All of these need to be implemented as well, which takes a lot of time and testing and focus separate from bug fixes (which are still our number one priority.)
There are other demands placed upon as well, in between Keylocker launch interviews and announcing our next game (Clowned King, check out the Steam page!) it has been a very busy few weeks..
So! Now we are working tirelessly on fixing bugs to make the experience of the game better for you all, and as I said earlier, there will be a patch with fixes to bugs this week.
And as for what comes next, we have 4 new languages to add, more Dateable characters to finish implementing (most of these are only missing their final scene) and more Backer content to add. In addition to these things I also want to make the Concert minigame playable through the Main Menu. There are actually more songs from the game itself that have been adapted for the minigame, and I'm looking forward to you getting the chance to try them out.
And lastly, this is more of a "maybe", but there are some half-baked remnants of the Black Hole system from Virgo in the code, and Anglerman is very interested in making that into a reality to give players more avenues of having fun with the combat outside of the main story content.
I want to finish this by saying, that for all of you who have enjoyed the game itself but had a bad experience because of bugs and crashes, I am truly sorry, and I hope to do everything I can to give you a chance to experience the game in a better light as soon as possible.
Thank you all for being Moonana fans and continuing to support our work.
It really means a lot to me.
Nana