Delays and their causes

So anyone who has been paying attention as of late will have noticed that our third game, Fortune Summoners, has been delayed twice now, with the second delay having been announced on the day the game was meant to come out.

This all perhaps requires some defense.  First of all, as a general mea culpa, the second delay announcement itself came so late due to the fact that I’m in the middle of changing apartments and thus my Internet situation is spotty at best at the moment. I’d actually hoped to have Fortune Summoners out before I moved, but that didn’t quite shake out. (The good news is, the move will make it tremendously easier for Robin and I to get things done in the long run.)

More generally, though, Fortune Summoners is being held back for a reason. This may not smooth any furrowed brows, but I can say this: the game is actually playable, right now. It can be played to completion in English.

We aren’t just settling for “playable”, however.

From the start, one of the goals I set for Fortune Summoners as a project was that the release would be absolutely flawless – that we’d release the game and then would have no need to patch it. While Recettear and Chantelise were both well-received in their respective launches, the sad fact is that they both launched with issues that required patching – multiple times, in Recettear’s case. (As you can imagine, the initial state of the FS demo left us a bit frustrated and left me wondering how I missed one or two of those issues.)

This isn’t actually acceptable to us, especially not if we intend to expand our business out onto platforms where patching *isn’t* readily available. We have to prove, to ourselves, our potential partners and most of all to you guys, our fans, that we can produce a product that is flawless out of the gate.

So we are taking the time to really get FS right. A few crash bugs were found in the last build, in particular, that were completely unacceptable in a game people would be paying money for. We wanted to make sure we corrected EVERYTHING before we got the game in your hands.

There have been other considerations as well – schedule timing with our distributors compared to when we had builds of the game available, for example – but above all, this is about quality. We were perhaps a little hasty in announcing a date for FS – a lesson Robin’s been whacking me over the head with, I assure you – but I would much rather give our customers something as close to perfect as we can make it, rather than something rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline.

I hope everyone understands, and don’t worry – Fortune Summoners will be in your hands very, very soon.

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