Putting on the finishing touches...

[Leedot]

Just a heads up to let everyone know what's been going on behind the scenes here. We're getting really close now with the last three remaining large tasks being to complete the IAP/Subscription code, Push notifications and a collection of video tutorials to help ease everyone into the game. Once these items are done we'll do a limited region launch in January followed by a full international launch.

You can see the first seven video tutorials at the link below.
Map Navigation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV9RryJtilI
Moving Ships
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-wSNX2Aw98
Local Planet Menu and Ship Building
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAOwR9ASm0w
Resource Collection
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUr3gC5Jgb0
Global Planet Menu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N_FssyWVw4
Global Fleet Menu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SuAtOJM2KI
Research and Specialties
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F3yi6Tsezo

[Lavenders2]

Exciting news! Fingers crossed for a successful launch!

[Snax]

Hope you devs had a good holiday.

I have been checking daily, but now I just have to ask. How are the launch preparations going and what regions will the initial client be limited to?

[Leedot]

Hi Snax

The initial release will be to open to Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

The reason for doing it this way is so we can ramp up our servers in a more controlled fashion than going from the 100 users Apple allows for testing immediately to a worldwide audience. The last thing we want is for players first experience with the game to be issues with lag and slow down so we're taking a more cautious approach.

If everything goes well in those areas a full global launch will follow soon afterwards.

[Balian]

Aww I live in Ohio, is that close enough to count as Canada so I can dl the game on the initial release? :D

[Leedot]

Balian - Hopefully folks in the rest of the world won't have to wait to long to join the fray. In theory it should all be the fine but it's better to tread cautiously, first impressions and all. :)

[Leedot]

Hey guys, just wanted to drop an update since it's now Feb.1 - we're very close now to our region limited launch, we came across a few last minute snags with the IAP for creating subscriptions that we're addressing before we submit to Apple.

We'll definitely be making an announcement as soon as we submit and again when the submission is approved. Most likely we'll be submitting on this coming Monday assuming nothing else comes up.

[Supamand]

Very excited! Even thinking of taking a little trip to Canada just so i could get on that limited launch :D
Unless you guys want to add NYC to the list ^^

[Lavenders2]

Yay, Aus is in the initial launch!
Just 1 quick question, how does the Apple subs work? Are they tied to your apple ID? Is it an in app purchase?

I just hope this model works, because I know a lot of people who will be put off by a P2P MMORTS, but at least there is no paying advantages :)

[Supamand]

It's been almost two weeks, how's the apple review coming along? I know from other games it takes around 1-2 weeks.
Curious if the limited launch has gone life yet.

[Lavenders2]

It's been almost two weeks, how's the apple review coming along? I know from other games it takes around 1-2 weeks.
Curious if the limited launch has gone life yet.

From the home page, it says they will make an announcement when they send it to apple and again when they accept it. So from what we know, they still haven't sent it. Either:
A: They have been busy and forgot to make the announcement
B: They changed their minds and decided to only announce apple accepting the app or make no announcement at all
C: Something has gone horribly wrong and they are still working on it

And unfortunately, C seems most likely at this point.

[Leedot]

Hey guys, while nothing has gone horribly there have been a few additional complications. In the last 2 weeks we've tracked down a pretty elusive crash bug involving texture memory swaps and we sorted out some usability issues with the iap subscriptions screen. This was a little more convoluted that we had anticipated since we allow up to five accounts to be associated with an itunes account since we know a lot of folks who have ipads wind up sharing them with other family members, etc.

Anyhow, the word from Zark is we should be submitting tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. We'll still make an official announcement once we've actually submitted.

[lordxorn]

Hey guys, while nothing has gone horribly there have been a few additional complications. In the last 2 weeks we've tracked down a pretty elusive crash bug involving texture memory swaps and we sorted out some usability issues with the iap subscriptions screen. This was a little more convoluted that we had anticipated since we allow up to five accounts to be associated with an itunes account since we know a lot of folks who have ipads wind up sharing them with other family members, etc.

Anyhow, the word from Zark is we should be submitting tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. We'll still make an official announcement once we've actually submitted.

Hi Lee,

What a long journey for you guys since your announcement on Toucharcade http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=76754 Dec. 15, 2010, with the first target release date of Q1 2011.

I am watching from a distance how your development has been going, and it will be very interesting to see how everything goes. I am a reviewer for the www.spacesector.com site and I wish you guys the best of luck.

Some things I have noticed, take them as criticisms or not, is that when you announce a game with a release date, better be sure to able to meet that dead line. This is where we enter the "deadline" debate, where many fans will say it is taboo to announce it because now you are being forced to put a deadline above polish.

You guys have admirably taken the latter, and this is why I am very interested to see how it pans out. It is now almost the end of Feb. 2012, as we are about one year past your initial release target. It is admirable as i have mentioned because you guys may have not anticipated the issues that popped up in Beta? I am hoping the lessons learned will pay off in spades.

This brings me to my next topic, why bother announcing a launch date, then miss is horribly, but keep us in the dark. This is where my criticism comes in, looking at the updates in the forums, blogs?, dev notes? there is too much time that has gone by where we the players don't hear anything. If you did not want to invest time in the PR area, as far as keeping your fans informed then you should have never announce a release date and just posted info about the game when you needed testers.

It would have been great to see a dev notes area on what led up to the issues in beta, and what has been done to correct them and make EOTE a great game.

Anyways, another timeline has passed where a submission to Apple was stated to be on the 14th or 15th, and still non news this close to limited release.

[Leedot]

Hello everyone,

Lord Xorn, you definitely raise some fair points and we appreciate the constructive criticism as pr is definitely an area that we could stand to improve in for sure. I do apologize for not keeping everyone more informed on what's been going on behind the scenes and I'm sure the constant delays and silence has been frustrating as I know missing our projected dates has certainly been frustrating for us as well. In the future we'll be more conservative in giving dates and being more communicative if those dates are missed. The last several weeks have been particularly hard to judge because frankly we've been 'a day away' the entire time so I've been holding off on giving updates with the expectation that I'd be announcing that we've submitted to Apple any day now.

As for some of the delays in the past you're correct in thinking that we encountered issues in beta and had to retool large sections of the game. Since early beta the way planets are claimed has changed, the resource production rates, ship production costs, and movement speeds were all rebalanced. The combat system we completely rewritten during beta to better deal with some of the issues we were running into and to pave the way for future expansion, the trade system was completely revamped, and we've done a lot of work to clean up any trouble spots in the ui and provide players with an extensive help system so players can get into the game more readily. A lot of these changes were discussed here on the forums with testers but we definitely could have done a better job of engaging the community as a whole with these issues and picking our timelines better.

In terms of the last couple of weeks the issue have largely been with the subscription system. So with that in mind all I can really say is that we're very close but if anything does come up in our testing we will stop and fix it and let you know what's going on.

[lordxorn]

Thank you for the frank and lengthy response.

i am sure the delays will bear fruit for your hard earned labors, and I am sure the community will look forward to improved pr.

=)

[zarkwizard]

Not much longer now my little smurfs...

*sigh* Sadly I think the first release date was missed due to huge retooling. Basically the game underwent a massive change, which in the long run has set us back quite a bit.

We are very close now. Final testing seems pretty good. While I would like to say tonight we'll be submitting... We can only hope we see no other issues. Everything looks good so far.

With it being such a huge game, and with such a massive scope it's been a very big undertaking for us. I can honestly say we are pretty happy with the result. A little sad it took us longer, but hopefully you'll all think it was worth the effort. Only time will tell.

We certainly appreciate your patience and I know LeeDot is very anxious to announce the submission...

With that I better get back to going over everything... :)

[fieryspoon]

Did the awesome combat graphics make it into the game?

[Leedot]

Fiery - Sadly no, but it will be included in an update. There were just so many other things that we wanted to address that had a more direct impact on game play that we felt like we needed to put it on hold.

There's a ton of things we've added / polished since the last public build but a few of the bigger ones are customizable push notifications, proper listing and route information for all ai controlled ships, progress details for win conditions and more general information for yourself and other players like numbers of ships destroyed / built, etc. and about 20min of video tutorials and such so hopefully it'll be a lot easier for new players to pick up.