Saturday Update!

Beta Testing guide: https://www.patreon.com/posts/beta-testing-126871293

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It's actually Saturday this time! Good morning!

So, last week was very stressful. I do think I got a reasonable amount of work done, but the stress of things is really getting to me.

I guess I'll start with the bad news, I always prefer to hear that first myself.

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The only bad news that may possibly affect you guys is that the review process with Steam is going kind of badly. I'm worried that they won't approve the game before May 1st, so I don't know if I'll be able to start the Beta Testing on time.

First they rejected my store page for legitimate reasons [ I used the words 'YOU KILL ME EVERY TIME' on some of my promotional images, and they said 'that's not the title of the game' because abbreviations aren't allowed on Steam I guess ] and because I didn't write a good description for the game [ This was fully True. I basically just wrote a list of warnings and called it a day ]

So I went in and fixed the images and wrote a real description, but the Storefront is not approved yet because apparently they don't want to approve the storefront before my game is approved now.

As for the game itself, that also got rejected. I honestly feel like the reasons were bullshit.

So for the achievements thing, they didn't like that I checked 'has steam achievements' on the store back end before they were in the game [ I was working on them this week ], which is fair enough I guess. I've unchecked the box on the back end.

But the other one really feels like bullshit to me. The death tokens are extremely easy to find, it's like he didn't click through the menus at all. Same with the warnings [ which are for content literally throughout the entire game ] Anyway, I sent 3 screenshots with red line circles about how to find and use the death tokens and what the warning content is like.

After I did all of that, I resubmitted the game for review [ Thursday night ] and I haven't heard back since.

I never experienced any of this with TPOF [ I mean my store and build did both get rejected once, but for far more legitimate reasons IMO ]. My tester this time seems to refuse to play the game for more than an hour [ I understand that ] but then wants to harangue me about not being able to see all the content when he didn't even try. 😩 Sorry, I'm just frustrated.

For now, there's nothing more I can do about this but wait and hope my stuff gets cleared before May 1st.

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The other bad news is that I now owe my parents 3 grand 😂 But it's for a good reason hopefully, and they've been really supportive of my choice. [ And I am gonna pay them ASAP ]

The choice I speak of is the choice to fully go ahead with the plushies. I've sent the full payment [ I was able to pay for most of it but I needed that loan to close the gap ] and the company tells me that the process will now begin.

^ Here's the timeline they sent me. So, if everything goes okay, the Plushies should be available to buy sometime in August. I know that's still kind of a long wait, but this is as fast as it can go and I'm at least glad that I scraped everything together and got started as soon as possible.

They also sent me this image example of the process, and it made me feel excited, so I wanna show you guys too:

The final correct sample looks so good. I'll do my very best to work with them and try to get the Strade plushies looking as good as that.

[ By the way, please don't take my temporary debt as a reason to send me more money in any way. I made my choices with full calculations of what I can do, and I have a budgetary plan that will allow me to pay my parents back. I think it's reasonable to push my resources as far as they can go right now to be in a better position when my game is published- and then I will be able to make returns eventually on all of this and get the merch wheel running smoothly ]

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I have a bit of personal stress as well that I still don't want to get into the details of, but the vague version is that my family member with the illness had surgery on Monday. That surgery went well but they found more of it. I'm going to need to help my family with physical labour chores they can't do and keeping them company because we're all a little scared. I might continue to have stressful days ahead.

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I did get some work done on the game between all of this!

I coded in all of the steam achievements [ beta testers might come up with more, but I got a reasonable amount made to start with ] and I drew up all the icons for those.

I also started putting in more memelord jokes. I had a backlog of ideas I kept in a personal discord server for myself and I've been working through that. I'm rejecting some of my old ideas that didn't hold up, but other ones are making it in and I honestly believe some of them are pretty good! I won't show any though, I want those to be a surprise.

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I think that's all I have this week!

If Steam can clear my game, Beta Testing will start on May 1st [ next Thursday ] as scheduled. Please see the link at the top of this post for all the information about that.

The Credits tier will be closed on April 30th [ Wednesday night ] regardless. After that, no more people will be added to the game credits! I will be making a post on Wednesday night with the final Credits Update.

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Hang in there, folks. Hang in there, me.