With a few weeks until launch I'm realizing things aren't ready. You've heard the song and dance of, "I want to give you the best product, we need more time!" yadda, yadda. I'll spare you that (though it IS true). Mostly the launch to Steam being pushed back a few weeks.

New Plan: 

I want to do a soft / alpha launch on itch. It'll be free. I'm thinking it'll be ready by my original launch date (10/29). The hope is that people will playtest and give feedback. I revise and refine R-Naught AND give the Steam page some much-needed TLC. Steam launch will be in late November.

Mistakes I Made: 

• Setting an arbitrary deadline by kind of 'eyeballing' what I had left to do. 
• Doing very ambitious things with the ending (which I did, and I'm happy about it - it just turned into a time-suck).
• Not hiring someone to market / promote or handle social media (I kind of did, but in a half-hearted way ).
• I started this project before realizing I had so much more to learn (about art, code, game design, etc.). Ideally, I'll always be learning and growing, but not to the point where the first half of a game is dramatically different than the second half... This feeds into the next point.
• Modularity. The loose framework for R-Naught was a slapped-together tutorial. It wasn't meant to be anything more than a tutorial and so all the systems were pretty single-purpose. I've re-written, and re-re-written all of the initial code, but still the core idea / structure that the tutorial was built around is there. That has been my biggest struggle. It's not a flexible structure. It's not a good foundation. It doesn't make for a good game. So, I've been reshaping these huge systems and every time I do, it affects the entire game and I have to playtest all 114 scenes again...

Game Updates:

• SO MANY THINGS
• Put in Pixel Perfect camera, which stops the edge bleed / screen tearing. It's not very cutscene-friendly, but it's a really nice tool otherwise.
• A slew of battle mechanic refinements. I'm embarrassed to admit the really simple things I fixed that have been broken forever...
• Art. All the art is done. It's done. I'm done with art. The arts done. I'll probably rework some more old pieces, but it's done.
• Music: Several tracks have been touched up. I have one track left to do, but it's almost done.
• Dialog and audio systems are so much better.
• Basically it. The ending needs some fine-tuning but all the pieces are there!