The Big News
HOMD’s release date has been postponed to the 3rd of February.
This is a decision I didn’t want to have to make, and I’ve only come to it after lots of discussion with the people at Failbetter, and a lot of thought on my own part.
Once again, I’ve been conned by my own optimism. I had thought the September release was eminently achievable, but unfortunately I hit an unexpected bottleneck – integrating written content into the game took about 1.5x as long as I expected it to. With over 250,000 words of text to add (and another 50,000 still left), this had a huge knock-on effect and thoroughly ruined my schedule.
In an effort to meet the deadline, for the last three months I’ve been working 14-16 hours every day, and only very occasionally taking a day off. There’s no way I can crunch any further or any harder! I say this not to get sympathy (because I love what I’m doing), but to assure you that I have been trying my best not to have to resort to another delay.
(Postponing until February means I can resume more tenable working hours, avoid burnout, and maybe even occasionally rediscover what weekends are.)
The Inevitable (but Heartfelt) Apology
I’m very sorry to everyone who was looking forward to playing HOMD in September. All I can do is assure you that this delay will ultimately make for a much better experience. The game will have more content, fewer bugs, and much more polish.
I’d also like to assure you that HOMD is shaping up to be quite fine. I think I’ve exceeded my own ambitions, and while I’m disappointed in myself for the six-month delay on the promised date, I’m feeling good about the quality of the project. Hopefully this won’t be a Kickstarter pledge you regret.
When it releases in February it will have been a 2-year-long project (including the time I took to learn to code) and I think that, considering the sheer amount of stuff in the game, this is still a reasonable turnaround. I hope you agree!
The Good News
In order to prove that I haven’t just been twiddling my thumbs for six months, I have uploaded a massive new update to the alpha on Steam.
It adds over 250,000 words of story, including 30 different stories for your crew and a number of side-quests. I’m still holding back the ‘main’ questline – which I don’t want to unveil until it’s fully finished – but overall, HOMD now features 80% of its final content.
If you were hesitant about trying out the alpha, now’s the time. With so much more content comes a whole new host of bugs, so I need your help. And with all this stuff to do, playing the game will now actually be fun. Until you crash and have to submit a bug-report.
A Handy-Dandy Chart
