Cubiq — the game itself — is virtually finished. There’s only one stage left that still needs a little bit of work done to flesh out the background visuals. But other than that, the game is fully playable and ready.
Or is it?
We decided we need to include a tutorial so that players weren’t totally confused about what to do or how to play. But tutorials are kind of strange beasts. It requires you to make your game function in a way it was never intended to function and only for that tiny little segment of game called the tutorial. It’s relatively a lot of work for such a small thing that most players will only do once (if that!) and then ignore forevermore. As such, it’s a balancing act to figure out how much time and effort is worth the benefit of making sure you don’t leave any players behind due to a lack of understanding of how to play.
Keeping these things in mind, we chose to make the tutorial fairly simple. Even so, adding the tutorial means adding more art, new bugs, more testing, breaking things that used to work fine but now don’t because the tutorial needs to use it in a weird way, etc. So that’s extending the amount of time before we can release.
Not only that, but even when the game is completely finished, we still have quite a bit of other work we need to do to prepare for the launch. We’ve been focusing so much on making and finishing the game that we’ve neglected a lot of other important things mostly related to marketing. We don’t have a website for the game. There are other things that we couldn’t do before, such as a video trailer, because many of the visual elements and sounds were still being finalized.
So basically I guess I’m just saying the same thing I said last time. Even though the game feels like it’s 99.9% finished at this stage, we still have lots of work ahead of us before we can officially launch the game.
More details and hopefully a website or trailer, next time.
