Hi all.
It's August and I'm happy to announce a new build for the month.
The bulk of last month's work has been on completing the artwork for all the cutscenes throughout the game. Although a review may see tweaks to that artwork, the story aspect of the game is now complete. This is an important milestone in that it means dev work can return to fun things such as bug squashing, adding extra bosses and sorting out the save system.
There's still a good block of work to be done, but I'd like to pose a question about release timing.
When should TU2 leave early access?
Do you guys have any thoughts?
Doing some research on Google, a few points come up.
Firstly, some say November.
This is to take advantage of the Xmas buying splurge.
Downsides are that everyone else will be doing the same along with a number of heavyweight triple-A titles. These big releases can suck the air out of the market and there's defintely some big titles due November this year, including RDR2 (although that won't be a PC release intially).
Other option is to leave it till late January.
Thinking here is that people are starting to spend again but more importantly, it's a quiet period where an indie release is more likely to be noticed. You only get one chance at a successful launch, so why rush it at the end? Another couple of months of dev couldn't hurt.
Last point is to avoid Steam sales as during these the new releases window pretty much goes AWOL. For example, the game below (Youropa) was released during the last Steam sale. Who knew?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/640120/Youropa/
(I point this game out as the author also produced the Giles lightmapper utility which has been of immense help to me over the years.
Then again, Steam has become such a gushing hosepipe that it probably doesn't matter when TU2 is released.
For example, Steam lists 46 new games released just today.
Let me repeat, 46 releases in one day (actually two more popped up while I was writing this and the day's not over).
Out of interest, roughly breaking those releases down looks like:
A third look to be trash. For example:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/897840/Alien_Hunt_3D/).
<edit> Looks like the link above is broken because the game (Alien Hunt 3D), was a bitcoin miner and has been taken down!
A third are early access and so are not complete (and may never be completed).
A fifth are VR only or are free.
Long story short, about a fifth of the releases I looked at are games that seem to be technically competent and are sold as complete.
However that's still ten titles a day to compete against for attention.
BTW: Known issue with this build:
Beams between distant pylons are not connecting.
Looks messy but doesn't affect gameplay. Is something to fix in the near future.