Jolly Rover
Beta going as planned, release date set.
The Jolly Rover Beta is going very well! And by well I mean, I've only received minor bugs and generally good feedback. The negative feedback I've received has been mostly from people who prefer Puzzle and Arcade games over adventure, which if fair enough.
I'll share with you one of the comments from a Beta tester that made my day:
"Overall it's a fantastic game, I'd say better than the recent MonkeyIsland offering. The pace of the game was excellent (MonkeyIsland felt a little sluggish with being trapped on the same island for so long) and the story was interesting. I really like how the game ties together."
So, as you will have noticed in the subject line the Jolly Rover release date has been solidified to June 7th, which is a Monday. It was going to be the previous Friday, but experience tells me it's good to have the weekend to sort out any last minute issues. After much debate I've also settled on a price of $19.95.
Over the past week I've been talking to, and signing with a bunch of distributors. The current distributors for Jolly Rover are:
- Oberon Media
- iWin (iWin, Exent, WildTangent)
- Club Casual
- mygameIQ
- Real Networks
- Greenhouse
- Mac game store (Pre-order here: http://www.macgamestore.com/detail.php?ProductID=1476)
Steam has yet to look at the game, they were busy last week with the release of their service on Mac. I'm still excited about the prospect of getting Jolly Rover on their service. There are a number of other distributors I'm talking to, but am comfortable with the current list I have. I'm especially excited about getting on Greenhouse, as the game first had to be looked at and approved by Mike and Jerry of Penny Arcade, and from what I can tell they liked it!
And now for some cool stuff! In direct violation of what you're supposed to do during the Beta phase I added 2 more scenes by zooming into some art we already had, I justified this as increasing the usability of the game. All the functionality was already there, I just had to wrangle some new art out of existing art. The results are two cool scenes on the third island, with one being a mini-game in its own right, that should probably have been a closeup scene from the start!
This next week I'll be playing the game as much as I can, after making a super-cool trailer. Watch this space!
Jolly Rover hits GM this Friday (21st) by the way.