Guess what? Still delayed! ;)
Sorry I haven't been keeping up with my Daily Blogs, but it's been head down working when not attending weddings. I feel like Network Rail with these delays, but it's all good! Well, mostly.
The Early Access version of the game is complete save for tuning and polish, which is time consuming. I want to give a proper game experience to players, and not a barely-held-together bug-fest as Early Access can be on new titles. There's quite a lot of working and reworking to create a good user flow. It's quicker and easier to use text instructions, but less intuitive and you can't be sure they'll be well read, so I'm replacing them with video clips. It's also important to create a linear flow introducing game concepts without overwhelming your users. Despite the simplicity of a space shooter, there's actually quite of info, not least because of the five control schemes each needing their own instruction flow.
Meanwhile, the issue about the name novaWARS remains unresolved, as ESTgames contacted me (after two weeks' silence from the initial complaint) to explain they filed for the trademark 'Nova Wars' in Korea in March, right about the time I announced my game 'novaWARS', despite three games having used that name before them. And when they filed that name, they didn't think to secure it in the App Store and now want me to give it up.
I'm not going to let that bog down release. The Early Access on Android will be out by the end of this week (probably a couple of days), and out on Steam very shortly afterwards. It depends how much reworking of promo materials I have to do with a change of brand or not, plus the PC needs a little personal polish. Then I'll roll out a close iOS alpha.
Not long now!
