Another month goes by and another Margin Notes comes alive with new information regarding The Way To Life’s fast approaching launch window. Let’s get into it! ~ THE WAY TO LAUNCH ~
The Way To Life is officially fully playable from start to finish and is feature complete! It’s very exciting to be able to say that finally.
Development on The Way To Life officially started two months ago with plans to finish the game within one month. As time went on and the delicate balance of developing a video game while holding a day job as well became ever more contentious it became obvious that the one month development timeline was not entirely realistic. Fortunately for us, that window of time was flexible and we were able to extend it to two months. At the time I thought that it would be plenty of time to develop this relatively simple game. I was proven wrong yet again. The latter two weeks of November proved to be a mad scramble to implement every feature and iron out all the major bugs to release the game in a stable and non-game-breaking state. Every day after I fixed one bug two more seemed to show up and even then some old bugs returned for seemingly no reason.
NOTE: I am not a programmer. I am an art and design guy. So these bugs quickly became the bane of my existence.
Finally, with the bugs mostly ironed out and the game in a fully playable state I was able to submit it to Steam for review. The game is slated to release on December 16th, much later than the November release window that we had originally planned for.
The reason for the delay is entirely on me. This being my first game I wasn’t fully appreciative of not only the scope of the game and the potential complications in getting it release ready but the backend tasks like preparing the game for Steam also proved to be a greater hurtle than I expected. In true “you don’t know until you try” style I was fully unaware of just how complex launching a game can be, and in making The Way To Life I have been given an important education on that very thing.
Making The Way To Life has been vital to my understanding of what it takes to get a game to its final state and honestly if I had gone ahead with ASSIAH and ran into these same issues after years of development I don’t know what I would do. I feel a lot more prepared for the next project, but a lot of that also comes with the knowledge that there are things I won’t be able to plan for and need to be ready to adapt to.
The bright side is that the game is done and being reviewed by Steam, and hopefully there are no issues on the backend preventing the game from hitting its December 16th launch day. To celebrate this here are some screenshots that you’ll see on the Steam Page when it goes live!
Thanks for your patience with the team on this process, there’s been a lot of learning involved in making The Way To Life and so much of that includes unforeseen hurtles and obstacles that we’ve had to learn and adapt from. It’s been quite the experience and I’m very glad to have gotten to get through it.
Keep an eye on the social media pages for the announcement when the Steam page goes live so you can purchase The Way To Life!
Cheers!
-DannyMac