Done!I made it! It's still summer! Thank fuck!
Papers, Please is all set to release next week, August 8th on Steam, GOG.com, and the Humble Store. Pre-orders are open now on
PapersPlea.seMy apologies for the silence on here. These last months have been completely insane with finishing, testing, fixing, tweaking, polishing, signing contracts, making store assets, redoing websites, setting up support systems, check user-submitted names, and stressing the fuck out.
Pre-orders open today and I'm actually still working on small things for the game. The final build needs to be boxed and shipped by Monday morning to hit the Thursday release.
From the BetaI took feedback from the open beta and tried my best to fix everything while adding as much content as I could. Originally I had planned on 30 days for the full game but when laying out all the events (by far the hardest part of the development for me), I just couldn't fit it all in. So the final game has 31 days.
20 EndingsThere's 20 endings in all, which is honestly way too many. Adding a new ending became a logical and elegant way to handle all the different things the player could do. 12 of the endings are considered "early" in that they appear before the 31 days are up. The remaining 8 are attainable at the end of day 31. Which ending you get is dependent on the decisions you make during the days and nights. The branching save system makes it easy to go back and try different things.
Endless ModeThe full version features a separate "Endless" mode that's unlocked by reaching a certain Story mode ending (or finding the unlock code on the net). There's 3 game-types (Timed, Perfection, and Endurance) and 4 rule-sets (which documents and rules are in effect at the checkpoint) to choose from and Steam leaderboards for the score rankings.
LaunchingI've done my best to coordinate everything (press emails, twitter announcement, this post, greenlight update, website update, stores going live, etc, etc) to make the announcement today. Honestly I've been pretty overwhelmed by this part of the project. Making games is great fun until the last 10%.
SupportThe thing that scares me the most about releasing this game is the support. Mainly, I'm worried about someone buying the game and having it not run properly on their system. I fixed a lot of issues from the beta but wasn't able to run a complete system test on the final build. My plan is to work as diligently and quickly as possible to fix any issues that come up after release. Steam makes it very easy to update a game in the wild which is great for a small developer like me. GOG and Humble Store are a little harder, but I've at least set up a pipeline that lets me create update builds quickly and easily. There'll also be a support page where I can put common problems and their solutions and players having issues can fill out a form to request support directly.
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