Okay, I'm pretty much going to snip bits of an email I sent out to staff:
[snip]
Here's the TLDR:
1. The game is feature-complete, and the testing is going well. There's a lot still to do, but it's definitely a fun game!
2. That said, there are a lot of ongoing balance, graphical, and interface things going on that simply just take time. I'm not really referring to anything that the artists are doing (though that does also take a lot of time), I'm referring here to things like the animations for attacks, etc.
3. There are a number of interface fluidity and clarity things that are really bothering me, and it's something I want to work out before I get into having other players touch this at all. They'll be a distraction, not a help, at this point. I want to be whiz-bang good at playing this before I really get other people into it, which is a big departure from all our past games except AI War. I feel it's important.
4. The art is still, frankly, ongoing. Not that anyone is running late or anything like that, but it's just an absolutely huge amount of art. And to really show this well in videos, there's a variety of things that have to be done. The buildings are coming along famously, and the particle effects and other animations are in progress, but it's just a case where I'd rather have our first showing of this look amazing rather than show something sooner than later.
5. Once we do get players involved, I want to really have a goodly long bit with them really beating the heck out of it, and then later a goodly while where we can have this in the hands of press prior to this going to 1.0. There's a vague chance we could still pull that off by May... but it would be a major crunch if everything went perfectly, and it would be a fumble at the 1 yard line if things went anything less than perfectly.
What this means:
A. [snip] We'll reach out to the various other indies and find out what we can about releases in June. Hopefully if the game is awesome then it won't matter what time of year we're releasing in, but [snip]
B. We aren't bleeding cash per se, but our reserve is continually dripping away at varying rates. The discount promotions that we've done with our existing games, even TLF, have been less than stellar. Possibly it's partly the time of year, but part of it is probably also that Steam is just so saturated now. In the past if we put the Valley games on sale, we'd get a certain amount of income because people would see them and try them out. Now in a crowd of 100+ games each week being on sale, it seems like most of our serious income except for AI War and TLF is disappearing. Which in some respects is fine, but it does mean that we can't drag this out indefinitely.
C. I'm not keen to do a public beta, I'd like to keep this closed. I think that doing it publicly would be something that removes some excitement and urgency from people. We only get one launch.
D. I do plan on asking the testers to feel free to make donations to us for the game via Paypal if they want to help support us. They aren't buying the game by doing that -- [snip] -- but it might give us a little bump in revenue there. Those who can and wish to contribute can do so, those who can't or don't want to or who feel they are already doing enough with their time can not. If we want to think of some Kickstarter-like rewards for people who donate a certain amount, then I suppose that might be interesting so long as it doesn't take a huge amount of work to do those rewards. But I don't want to go too far down that path, anyway.
E. For the art schedule, mostly this won't affect a lot, although this will give Blue and Cath some more breathing room for extended polish, things like vehicles, marketing images, etc. The buildings are still the top priority, but [snip]
F. Ideally we wind up with the artists being done at least a month in advance of the game being released, which actually seems feasible with this revised schedule. That way we have time for proper trailers, press builds without any temp graphics, and so on. During that time, we can also have Blue and Cath starting on the next title's art, which is great to get ahead on. I'm super excited about that next title and don't feel like that one will be such a time hog to create, incidentally.
G. Overall we will continue as planned for the most part, with the exceptions of not trying to put out a gameplay video this week and [snip]. And then beyond that, we'll see how things feel. If we hit sometime in April and are thinking "wow, we totally could release this in May," then, well, we will. But right now I want to be planning for the realistic case, and then if something changes then we can be pleasantly surprised. There's a lot to do, though, and I'd rather do it right than release in May, all told. As much as releasing in June is a scary prospect, it's definitely better to Do It Right (tm).
[snip]
