Hi everyone!
To begin with, just wanted to say thank you to everyone for helping us have such an amazing launch week. Let's chat about the future of Combolands and Crux in general.
The first thing you should know is that we both work part-time at Crux. We've been been able to be full time for launch, but from next week we'll unfortunately have to be back to part-time - for a while at least. Not only that, but we're both exhausted from a very stressful final push, so yeah, we need to recuperate a bit.
With that out of the way, our focus for the next little while is going to be first on localization and second on Steam deck verification.
We would have loved to launch with both of these things already done but our timeline didn't allow it.
Combolands has a somewhat complex data setup - allowing text to be constructed procedurally in the game. This is great for helping the game's UX but is a nightmare for preserving grammar and things making sense with translation. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it will/would have taken longer than we had pre-launch. So that's step 1, getting the game into more languages.
Many of you have/want to play the game on Steam deck or with a controller. That's super cool for us, we think it's a really good fit for the deck, but again we had some issues with this pre-launch. To begin with, neither of us even own a Steam deck. In fact, they don't sell them in South Africa (where we're from) so we need to find a way to get our hands on one. Once we have one, we can tackle the issues that have been raised most often, particularly around text legibility. Then we can get the game to verified.
After those two things are done, we will be able to look around and assess our situation better. It's very hard for us to give a timeline on either thing, but we certainly don't want to drag this out - we wanted to have both done by launch as it was.
Even considering all this, we'll continue to keep an eye on things and if any major issues crop up we'll do our best to patch them.
And lastly, we'd deeply appreciate it if you've enjoyed Combolands that you leave us a review, we're really close to Overwhelmingly Positive and it would be so cool to get there in launch week!
Sam & Skye