Hempuli's blog

Earlier today I finished the last “obligatory” things in ESA. There are some tweaks I want to make and polish to be done, as well as a load of bugs I haven’t noticed yet; I’ll be sending the first “final” version to testers tomorrow and hopefully the final missing things will be tweaked to some kind of a final state in the coming weeks.

So, what’s missing? Why’s there no release date?

There are two reasons for me not having decided on a release date yet and in general being somewhat confused and/or worried about the game’s release:

• Audio: When I say that the last obligatory thing is done, I mean the last obligatory thing I can personally affect; there’s some sound missing and we’re working on getting the rest of the soundtrack done. Due to several good reasons the composer has been very busy for some time now and has thus been unable to work much on the soundtrack, which I completely understand but which means that the release will have to wait. In the meantime I’ll be trying to build up a placeholder sound system, so that adding the audio will be as quick and painless as possible.
• Publishing: For about half a year now people’ve asking me about whether the game will be freeware or not. To be absolutely honest, I’d love to release the game for free, and even promised this some time ago at a moment when I felt completely overwhelmed by life and didn’t feel like thinking at all about founding a company or any of the other things that go into successfully publishing a game.
  However, I’d definitely need the money, and know some amazing people who could help me a lot with the more confusing aspects of publishing a game. It also seems to me that these days people are much less willing to download some random freeware games off a website, and instead prefer Steam and other such platforms due to the ease and a hint of quality control. So in the end, I’m really undecided on this issue, which kind of awful because going through the publishing ordeal would affect the release date pretty drastically.

So there; hopefully these two things will be figured out eventually, but right now they’ll continue to be obstacles for releasing the game. I guess I’ll try to spend whatever time is left to polish everything as much as possible.

 In other news, I’m working on a comic! I’ll post it here once it’s done; it’s pretty terrible but it feels great to be working on a larger art project after such a long time.