Development update - holding pattern (Patreon)

Right now things are... well, more than ready to go. The beta for The Velan Reach has more or less run its course, and we caught a fair share of issues that have been addressed. I have updates standing by to roll out. But the approval process on Steam is weird and protracted, and right now the game's approval is hung up on trivialities that will no doubt be cleared, but it's slow going.

In the mean time, plenty of stuff is going on. I've touched up my profiles and presentations on various sites. Gods, I suck at the commercial and promotional stuff, but being a creator and tinkerer first and a sales person, well, much later down that line, I've been ignoring it for too long, and it's beginning to hurt. To try to turn things around, I've also got updates for Light of my Life standing by to roll out with updated promo links to help promote The Velan Reach.

And as I've mentioned, I've been busy with development on Light of my Life chapter 10 already, with a story outline done, several scenes worth of dialog written, and visuals for the first scene produced. I'm gonna try and put it together today, and get going with the next scene in time for the Wednesday status update.

I'm also gonna prepare some behind the scenes blog posts to come out when The Velan Reach does, and get going on a wallpaper soon (perhaps I'll put up a poll for that, I'll have a look one of these days at my idea list for some options).

But more than anything, I'm just aching to get busy with releasing The Velan Reach out into the wild.

Wild guess at an ETA?

I wanted to have it out this weekend already, but I'd be really happy if I can have the public release here and on the other places next weekend. The one after perhaps, if the resubmission takes even longer to process. I'll make sure to keep you posted on that.

(note: the rest is nitty-gritty for those that are interested in those things, and can be skipped without missing anything)

So what is the plan when it does come out?

For chapter 1 of The Velan Reach, it'll be pretty much like with Light of my Life. I'll put up links here and other places.

I'll put it out on Itch together with a demo to hopefully work around the problem of paid NSFW games being basically invisible there since the payment provider crackdowns. If you're on the right tier, I'll set it up so you'll be able to claim a copy there instead of having to download it from one of the mirrors.

Even after it's been approved there, it won't be available on Steam just yet though. Not until it meets that magical number of wishlists needed to help it find an audience there. As I mentioned earlier (at least, I think I did), I'd like to give backers an option to claim a Steam key based on their lifetime support, but I shouldn't be counting those chickens just yet, so more on that later.

But if you're not releasing on Steam with the rest, why not roll it out on those other channels right now?

A big part of the in-game promotion is about getting players to wishlist the game on Steam. If Steam turns out to be a dead end again, I don't get to redirect that energy somewhere else where it could help turn the numbers around. So just hang in there a little bit longer.

Shouldn't you have started the submission sooner?

In hindsight, maybe? The documentation promises 3-5 days to complete, but I've been at it since late December, so, hrm. Lessons learned, perhaps, but also, it's been tedious.

Now I'm curious, what's the trivial stuff?

Seriously, it's too trivial to even mention, but if you really want to know, it's controller support. Who cares about that for a Ren'Py game, right? I've lost two weeks going on three on the submission process going back and forth over vaguely documented checkboxes in the Steamworks backend and store page settings concerning controller support of all things. Urgh.

On the up side, I guess that means they don't have any quibbles on the content (which would have very much surprised me but then again, I've been surprised in that regard before), but still, something about counting your chickens and all that. 🤞