Hey everyone! First off, we very much realize that this update is really late in coming. After releasing the update earlier in the year, the plan was for this update to essentially be the “official releasing of the game update”.  Unfortunately the save / load system has continued to slow things down.  We continued to hold off on this update in hopes that things would get finished. 

A few things I want to make clear. We really appreciate all of you and your patience. We realize some of you are very upset and are chomping at the bits ready for this game to be released. We hear you and you have every right to feel the way you do. All we can say is that this game is going to come out. Not releasing this game is not an option. Please realize we are SO close to the finish line here. All of us have dedicated so much energy, blood, sweat, tears, and not to mention family time to get this game done. There have just been a lot of set backs in this project beyond anyone’s control. This is not about making excuses, just stating some facts. Regardless, SpaceVenture is absolutely going to get released!

SO WHAT HAS BEEN THE FOCUS THE LAST FEW MONTHS?

The majority of our focus has been on the save/load system, which has gone through a major overhaul. To clarify on the problems with the save/load system, we had put the original system in place during the beginning of our progress on the game, and it worked okay during that time. During the first phase of SpaceVenture, we didn’t have anywhere near the amount of game mechanics as we ended up with when the game got to its final stages. Throughout this process, the save/load system got back-burnered due to us trying to finish the full game. Our thoughts were that it shouldn’t be too much trouble to bring the system up to date once we had all the mechanics in. Unfortunately this was very wrong. 

The approach we should have taken would have been to modify the save / load system along the way. This would have taken longer to get to the final stages of the game, but we would have not ran into the problems that we have now.

On top of the save / load system being worked on, there has been more polish put into the game as well. Our beta testers did a great job of documenting things that were wrong and team members not working on save / load components have been able to put some time on those items as well.

HOW WILL THE SAVE / LOAD SYSTEM OPERATE IN SPACEVENTURE NOW?

In a perfect world, we would love for the player to be able to just save anywhere, anytime they want and be able to restore and things go exactly back to the way they were. In a lot scenes in SpaceVenture, you will get just that.

There are going to be three things to understand about the system you will experience while playing SpaceVenture:

• Normal Saving and Loading: The game lets you save on a scene and you can just restore back to the way they were when you saved.
• In certain sequences saving will be disabled: During certain areas of the game, mostly when animation operations are occurring, there will be a red X that appears over the save icon. You will need to wait until a certain sequence finishes or complete some small task before you will be able to save. There are very few cases in the game where you will experience this.
• Saving in certain scenes will reset the scene upon reloading: On certain scenes due to the different mechanics occurring, the scene will reset upon reloading. This issue has been the biggest thing we’ve been trying to solve during the course of this year. Unfortunately there is just no easy answer to solving this problem for every single scene in the game. The good news is, this is just in a few areas of the game and understand that even when the scene resets upon load it will take very little time for you to complete tasks to get back to where you were before reloading. Also, you will know when this is going to occur because the game will warn you before saving.

SO WHATS HAPPENING NOW?

We are very close to having the save / load system working for the whole game but there are still some troublesome areas that we are fighting. These areas need to be 100% working with the system before we release the game.  

WHEN THE GAME IS RELEASED WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT?

The game will be released on Windows first. As you all probably remember, we are using Unity as the game engine so porting the game over to the other systems shouldn’t be a big problem, but we do expect there to be some issues that need to be worked out for that to happen. We also realize that you all may report bugs and we will try to release fixes for those as well. 

After all of that, we will be working on shipping rewards. Please do not message us your updated address information for rewards. We will eventually send out a survey that will allow you to put your updated information in there for us.

So that’s it folks. The next update WILL contain info about releasing the game and how it will be going out. Thank you all for your patience and hope you will find the game to be worth the wait when you get it.