Greetings everyone,
The fourth full release candidate is now available. With this update, all first-party game-related items are considered complete. I have finished the maps that will ship with the game and fixed several bugs in this release candidate.
With the fulfillment of the map data, the game is complete! We're ready to remove the Early Access tag from GearCity and step forward into the post-release phase of the game.
But there is a problem. It's a matter of timing. Q4 is probably the worst time to release a non AA game. This time of the year, major studios are releasing their big-budget games for the holidays. Most games will have weeks of discounts for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years' sales. In short, it's difficult to gain sales and attention when you have to compete with 90% discounts on past blockbusters.
With that in mind, even though I'm ready to remove the Early Access tag from GearCity, I won't be doing it this quarter. However, I am willing to confirm a release date! Assuming it does not conflict with a Lunar Sale, GearCity will be officially out of Early Access on January 14th, 2022.
This is a fitting date, as official work began on GearCity around mid-January 2010. (Work on the engine predates even the idea of making a GearCity.)
I won't be spending the time idle. I plan on continuing to fix bugs as you report them to me. I've also been working on the manual http://wiki.gearcity.info, and it will give me time to work on business, marketing, and community-related tasks that I have put on the backburner. Such as reopening our official forums, setting up an IRC-Discord-Matrix bridge, etc. Then there is the matter of the planned post-release feature bounty system that I need to set up. The small delay will also give time for any remaining translations to finish.
The journey is almost at an end.
You can find the full changelog here.
Sadly a few things slipped through testing:
Hotfix #1
-Bugfix: Fixed Random History New Game Crash.
-Bugfix: Fixed Stock Detail Panel not showing for Player's company.
-Bugfix: Fixed Italian Flag crash on European Test Map.
-Bugfix: Fixed Map Logos not loading on 64-bit builds.
-Translations: Added Japanese Review Text.