I have been working on Network Traders for one year and 9 months – long enough, time to go live! The game will be released for open testing on Google Play Store on September 23rd 2022. Then, finally, it will be available to everyone on their Android device. This is really exciting, and two and a half very busy weeks are waiting for me!
Have you ever heard the term feature creep? It describes what many game devs tend to do: add feature after feature to their game because this one is really important! But even if you think that you cannot go without this next feature, you will have to take your chances at some point – or wait indefinitely for the “right” moment. So last weekend I just said: “What the heck, I want to know now! Is anyone actually going to play my game??”
Release Preparation
Of course, publishing a game needs some preparation. Loose ends have to be tied, Play Store requirements have to be met, and some kind of marketing has to be done. So I moved the release date three weeks into the future in hopes of achieving all this. And Friday evening seemed like a good time to really enjoy this event.
This is what is left to be done:
- Write a data privacy statement (reeeally looking forward to this!),
- finish the store entry with some screenshots,
- create a nice monitoring dashboard to see if there are actually any players playing,
- write a few devblog entries,
- add some more tooltips,
- tweet about it,
- fix a couple of bugs of the annoying type,
- add ads,
- remember to teach the city name generator some English,
- fix some more bugs,
- and invite some friends over!
Well, not all of it will be done in two and a half weeks. But then, this game will, very likely, never be done, because there is so much I can think of adding. So expect updates and new content continuously!
One thing, however, is going to keep me on edge: how long will it take Google to approve the release? I have upgraded from internal to closed test five days ago, and testing is still not done! According to Google, this may take up to 7 days or longer! So all changes to the app will have to be done at least one week before release to get it upgraded to open testing soon enough. So much that could go wrong, so keep your fingers crossed!