Personal Update

I should start with why I've been a little elusive about the release date here and why I went dark for a few weeks until now. There are two reasons. First, I was on vacation for 10 days in Japan which was amazing. Second I came home to a family emergency that left my mother in the hospital. I'll start with the bad part and end with the good part for sanity.

I'm going to be brief because I don't think the public needs to know the details and we're still actively navigating the situation. My mother has been in the hospital for about a week and I along with the rest of my family have been there every day to assist and provide some conversation to my father. She is stable and will be coming home soon, but will still need some help each day for at least a few more weeks. My whole family is pitching in to help get through this. Obviously this has an impact on my timeline and perhaps (but hopefully not) the level of polish I can achieve in that timeline. Not exactly how I wanted to come home from vacation...

My vacation was amazing. 10 days in Japan with friends. We walked until our feet hurt, ate until we couldn't, and then drank until closing time. We went from Shibuya to Osaka and back to Shinjuku. The public transport in Japan is inspiring. We never had a late train, and were rarely confused even though we speak and read very little Japanese. The food is incredible and affordable. It was hard to spend more than $30 USD on a meal per person, and most of it was some of the best Steak, Ramen, Sushi, etc. you'll ever have. We also shopped and came back with various snacks and souveniers. I came back with a handful of retro gaming items that I snagged from thrift stores. Overall an amazing experience and I can't recommend it enough.

Game Update

Alright so all of that means I'm not going to get to shadow drop this on Black Friday the way I sort of wanted to. I'm currently slated to release this on December 3rd. Yes, that's correct 1 week from now!

So what's left you might ask? Not a whole lot actually. I've got 1 obstacle left to create. That obstacle is a rising platform that could mess up your jumps or push you into spikes! I've also got the entire last "world" to create levels for. That's really only 15 levels. I've already got the tile set, items, and most of the mechanics done for those. I've also got to update the World Generation screen, I did it quick and dirty during Next Fest and it needs a bit of a facelift. Other than those 3 things, we're ready to launch.

I do have a bit of a stretch goal list of tasks that I'll be working on shortly after launch but hopefully before. Things like the storage equipment menu's selection icon being hard to view, steam achievements not actually being in the game, and a few others. Things that aren't critical path, but ideally I'd have them in there.

Sign Off

That's it for this week. I'll be hard at work on the last few levels and some polish to hopefully get a serviceable game launch out next week.

Thanks again for reading and following along!

Lee