Hello together,
it’s really been a few hectic weeks since the last blog entry. We are really happy that we are mostly rated positive on Steam. But let’s start chronologically from the beginning. What’s happened since the last blog entry.
The two weeks before our release on 21.06 we had made ourselves a good plan. What things still have to be integrated. What definitely has to run stable. We have divided up our time well and have tackled things with priorities. It was really hard to let go sometimes.
Unfortunately we were a bit too optimistic with the submission to Steam. Over the last weekend Steam had checked the game for the first time. Unfortunately many critical results came back there. So we had to deactivate a lot of things for the first time in order to submit the game again as soon as possible. We did that on the Monday before the release. MUCH TOO SHORT!! As already said we had to switch off many things. Mainly the operating system support like Linux and MAC. But that should be only temporary. We all work in our team with Windows. Therefore we never had the possibility to test MAC or Linux. Only after the release we switched on the virtual machine and started Linux. But more about that later. So we switched off many features and hoped that Steam would check the game before the 21.06. That went almost wrong. Because in the morning on 21.06 we received the feedback that Summer Islands was ready for Early Access.
To be honest that was quite a relief. Because Q2 2019 was only June and there were a lot of Steam comments asking for a release day.
So we were lucky again.
But now came the much bigger task. We released Summer Islands with the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere on 21.06 at shortly after 12 o’clock. It was an incredible feeling. Even if it was just a click on a button somewhere in the Steamworks account.
With the release came the first problems. Due to our limited hardware test possibilities one could of course not test the almost infinite number of hardare combinations. This was already pre-programmed that some errors would come. We were always awake the weekend immediately after the release to fix the bugs. In summary, we did our best. There were a few bugs with the different hardware. But also errors with variable declarations in rare cases. In the end we managed to fix the biggest bugs and with the current version 0.1.3 Summer Islands is enjoyable. For all of you who WANT to enjoy Summer Islands!!
Nowadays you have to emphasize such sentences a bit more. Because some negative ratings simply cannot be understood. Give money back and still give a negative rating. We have often mentioned that Summer Islands will not be a substitute for childhood memories. Even if we have integrated a similar concept and much more Features into Summer Islands. Tip on the side: you don’t have to flatten an entire island to build buildings.
Therefore we are twice and three times grateful to you for the many positive reviews and emails with feedback. The people who understood the meaning of Early Access. The people who even take the time to send us suggestions for improvement. With all these people who follow us on twitter, support us on steam or wherever and motivated us, recommended us to others, to these people we want to say THANK YOU!
Without you the game would not have been possible.
So and what comes now?
We continue to work as before and even better. Because we work with even more feedback from you. We already have a rough roadmap which we want to show you in the next weeks. But all in all there will be things like that:
-complex nature (more alive)
-Call integration with impact
-Many more consultants
-Weather Forecast
-Other catastrophes
-Campaigns
-BOT Increase difficulty
-….
-….
I hope you notice that there will be a lot more to come. It is still screwed at all places and we try to consider each feedback and if possible to integrate it.
So we hope you’ll give us the opportunity to implement the planned features and we promise you Summer Islands will develop its potential in the game feel yet.