Nope!
Rasternauts was released on Desura on the 16th April, making it almost ten months since the original Xbox 360 version came out. I do wish it hadn’t taken so long, and the chief cause wasn’t really anything technical. Most of the main changes were done last summer, with only the fixing of a few niggles and a desire to polish up a couple of the things I didn’t really like taking more time. That sort of fell down my list of priorities for ages, which can’t have helped.
What definitely can’t have helped was releasing a PC version with a bug that prevented game profiles – your progress, your preferences, etc. – from being created. I can only thank the Desura user Kloodge for bringing that to my attention. The basic issue there was that a save folder should have been created in the user’s Documents folder. At some point in the really stage of development, some change or other stopped that from happening. If the folder already existed, you’d never see the problem, and it worked fine for my testers, so evidently I broke it after I’d sent those out and then never really expected any further problems.
Now that’s pretty damn stupid of me.
Still, I was able to patch it within a few hours of discovering the cause, which means that the lovely folk who’ve bought the Indie Royale Mixer 3 Bundle won’t be affected by it. That’s good, because the vast majority of people who’ve actually purchased the game have done so via that very bundle. The game hasn’t done particularly well on the Xbox, teaching me valuable lessons in promotion that I have singularly failed to apply to the PC release thus far. So many respects, it’s nice to be able to reach a large number of people. I hope they give it a whirl, and I hope they like it.
Away from Rasternauts, I’m not entirely decided what I’m doing next. I like the idea of a football game, but I already spent the best part of a decade getting nowhere with one and I’ve come to enjoy my regained sanity. I will, however, play around with AI, and take the opportunity to get to grips with some new things. Rasternauts took me three years to learn how to write. I like to think the next thing won’t take that long.