Softly, softly …
OK we’re finally there, just days away from enabling public access to our 22month-long design & development endeavor. And … so far it’s looking good, relatively bug-free (there will always be more bugs to be found, once we’re being scrutinized by a reasonable volume of players).
Biggest surprise? We got the AppStore (also called a “Launcher” in the games Industry) up, running and reasonably feature-rich in record time. God bless veteran software developers who have done things many times before … we’re some ~4months head of engineering schedule on the AppStore, which means … drumroll … we can launch WITH THE APPSTORE on ‘Day One’, delivering a superior user experience. If anyone recalls, Valve’s ‘Steam’ launched with barely a clutch of games, and so we’ll launch with our first feature-complete game FATAL FRONTIER 1869 auto-downloaded and installed by the AppStore as well as featuring two excellent ‘Coming Soon’ game concepts on our creative roadmap, one about Pirates and the other about the Civil War. Achievements, Reviews, Wishlisting … it’s all in there, but admittedly bare bones (as you would expect). Critically you can create your Account, Login/Logout and do all the KYC required to play for real money placed at risk for reward.
Bravo Team Engineering, you’ve done a yeoman’s job here!
Pre-launch Database Build. OK so you can never have too big a pre-launch database and right now we’re on track to launch with 10,000+ hopeful Pioneers signed up. Surprisingly they’ve elected to give us all their information (Names, Mailing Addresses etc) and not just email addresses, which was a pleasant surprise as we started by saying “please give us your email addess” then tested a new Landing Page with “Please give us all the info about you”, with barely a change in the % of clicks > Landing Page > Sign Ups … gives us greater confidence that we are creating something people really want to engage with.
Merch. Also, we’ve had plenty of future Pioneers buying branded Merchandize in the online store. Who knew? To be fair, it’s a pretty cool logo and the quality of goods is really very high (and my dog Bailey turns out to be an awesome Hat Model). The Community seems to be really engaged and excited for launch. We get folks emailing most days, plenty of comments on Facebook and unbidden photos sent in showing us actual People gearing up to be virtual Pioneers. Great fun (hey, that’s what it’s all about, right? Serious fun!).
OK, that’s all for now … kept it light as we’re all pressed for time here. A release candidate build will be circulating today/tomorrow with a view to getting the Installer linked for download on an invite-only password-protected webpage (which installs the AppStore/Launcher, which installs our first game Fatal Frontier 1869). Phew! So many plates to spin, but after the insane success of in-person Retail play started early last month we’re all stoked to get our business live and online before 2026 is upon us (2026, so futuristic-sounding!).
Laters …
