We've made a couple posts about features and what now, but we haven't really given any information about when we are planning to release the game, and how we are going to do that. So let's dive into that!
We are currently very close to closed alpha, and by that we mean about a week. We will be distributing our alpha builds to a few select people, to make sure everything works the way it should. As with every alpha build, there will be some bugs, so we will take all the time we need to fix those, before moving on. It's hard to say how long this will take, because it all depends on the amount of issues we find, and their impact on development time.
That being said, closed alpha means we will have some actual games being played, meaning we will have some video footage to show you guys! We can also start working on the trailer to really show what we've made so far. When the closed alpha comes to an end, we can start working towards our early access build, which brings us to the next point.
After the closed alpha build is done, we will be working on adding a few things to make sure the early access version of the game is good enough. While we plan on releasing an early access version of the game, we don't want to make the mistake of releasing an early access game that is full of bugs. Ideally, the early access build would be feature complete, but not content complete. This means that every planned feature (customization, abilities, ...) is present in the game, and we will be releasing updates that add more content to the game, such as new maps, new abilties, new customization options, bugfixes, and so on.
Again, it's really hard to say when exactly the game will be accessible to the public. I'm sure everyone is aware of big publishers releasing games before they are finished, just to make a deadline. We will not be doing this. As Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto once said: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad".
Of course, that doesn't mean we have no idea whatsoever when the game is releasing. It's safe to say that we are talking about a few months time here. Now, how will we be distributing the game? Next Paragraph!
Schematic representation of Scuttlers' future
Back in February, Valve announced that they are going to retire Steam Greenlight, Steam's current way of allowing indie developers to release their game. Instead, Steam Direct will take its place.
We're not going to expand too much on what's different, but for anyone that is interested, the official announcement does a good job of explaining it. Anyway, we believe Steam Direct is a much healthier way to go about the whole releasing thing than Steam Greenlight is, so the current plan is to release Scuttlers via Steam Direct. The new platform will launch somewhere in during Spring 2017, so it will not delay our release.
The Scuttlers Dev Team
PS: As a result of our closed alpha testing, we will not be releasing a development blog next week, and possibly the week after that. Our main focus will be lying on improving user experience and fixing bugs, and these aren't very interesting topic to read about.
Scuttlers Development Blog ⋅ April 11, 2017