Sent out this newsletter just now: *********** Hey Defender's Quest Fans!
We've got some news!
The game is basically finished - while we clean up a few things on the technical side, we're waiting on our lawyer to finish the paperwork that will allow us to legally sell the game. The minute that's done, we can put the game up for sale. We don't know exactly when that will be, but from the looks of it'll probably be a week or so, pushing release back to January.
On the development side, we've been having a REALLY successful pre-release test, and fixing lots of bugs and balance issues. The game is very nearly ready. All that's left is to fix a few remaining bugs and tie up some loose ends, and then verify that the build is stable.
To that end, we have the goal of producing a "release candidate" build of the game before the end of this week.
A "release candidate" is a special build of the game that we release to our testers and REFUSE TO TOUCH while testers do their best to break it. That's because every time we fix a bug or add a feature, we might accidentally introduce a new bug, so we can't release a build to the public that's been modified recently. So, after several days of solid testing, if our release candidate survives, we can be reasonably sure that it's ready to present to the public at large.
Seeing as most of our team members are going to visit their parents for the holidays, we'll be unable to work on the game for a period of about 3 or 4 days. This is the perfect time for any testers looking for something to do over the break to have a crack at our release candidate. When we come back, we'll check the bug reports, and if there's no significant problems, we will have officially "gone gold," as they say in the indstury.
Hopefully our lawyer will be done with our paperwork by then and we can open our doors for business!
As we said before, this initial release will be a "beta" release at the discounted price of $6.99, but all you newsletter subscribers will be able to buy it for $4.99 with the coupon code I'll send you.
We'll be checking in again real soon!
Thanks, Lars Doucet Level Up Labs
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.fortressofdoors.com/nearing-release/