Hi everyone! This won’t be a long post, but I wanted to let everyone know that there’s a new official release date for Gem Wizards Tactics, and it’s now February 9th, 2021. The reasons why aren’t anything terribly special, but here they are if you’re curious:
- In general, the December release date was a bit arbitrarily chosen, and definitely on the ambitious side. Having that as the release date has really helped me to make incredible pace over the last few months, but now we’re in November, and I can see where we are and what we still have left. I think we probably *could* still make the December release date, but, first impressions are really important, especially for an indie (who is lucky to get even one impression). So I’d rather err on the side of “more time to polish” than less.
- For a couple months, we had Brett Lowey, the sole developer behind the BrainGoodGames games helping out with GWT. In those couple of months we made a ton of progress on features and polish in the game, but maybe more significantly, the design of the game went such a far distance during his tenure. But as of October 1, Brett has switched over to working on the digital version of my card game Dragon Bridge. Thus, I’m back to working on GWT by myself: all the art, game design, graphic design, programming, sound, music, and a lot of marketing and business stuff from here on in is gonna be done by me. So, I could probably use the extra 7 weeks.
- Over the last month, I’ve also gotten hooked up with some PR people (Indie Bros) to help with marketing needs. They’ve been awesome so far, and they were really in support of pushing the game back. They suggested the Feb 9 date for a bunch of very smart sounding reasons. So that’s what we’re doing.
Here’s a few fun tidbits about what’s been going on with the game:
- We now have a 3rd faction implemented: the Azure Order (Blue faction), who are focused on cavalry units, ice magic and building things. They seem pretty great so far, and actually are the most robust faction yet (we probably need to go back to the other factions and buff them up a bit as a result!)
- Massive improvements to the UI: it’s much easier to see how far your units can move and how much each tile costs to move to. Also, a whole new tooltip system is in the works.
- A new mode: Custom Games, which lets you play a single match. More work will be done on this before the game is done.
I have a ton more to do, but I’m feeling really good about the decision to delay the game. I can’t wait to share it with everyone!
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