A swing and a miss

[p]I realise you’re all busy people, so let’s cut straight to the chase; I have unequivocally missed the planned launch date, and have moved it 6 months out, to May 6th, 2026. [/p][p]Now that the bandaid’s ripped off, let’s dig into the how and why, and what this means.[/p][p]If we correctly recall the quote - “A game is only late until it ships, but it’s bad forever” (by Elleon Guon), and apply this, you’ve got your answer. Not that Phoenix is BAD right now, but getting things ready for launch is proving a lot harder and taking a lot longer than I’d initially thought.[/p][p]One of the community members, Wombat, made this comment, which really resonated with me - “The 10 year anniversary date is meaningful, but not important. “[/p][p]Part of my issue with the current state of the build is that I'm not confident in the balance of the game, nor the polish. It's stable, ofc - FCE always was![/p][p]When I was working on the various FCE patches, I would play the game end-to-end, multiplayer, for an entire month. Every time. Those of you who’ve played the game a lot will realise that’s a vast time commitment; completing the CryoPlasm fight in under a hundred hours is quite the challenge, and that means 25 hours a week for an entire month to achieve.[/p][p]I've been so busy constantly running back and forth, patching and fixing and swearing at lighting and fighting Unity breaking stuff that I simply haven't had a moment to try that. I've gotten to Chapter 6 a few times, but then have had to wind back to support issues the Patreons have brought up.[/p][p]I haven't managed to (visually) change the TD gameplay, let alone meaningful changes to make them target any outdoor facility. I haven't redone the surface resin gameplay to allow low-tier fluid handling. The oft-desired ability to smelt on-site isn't there yet. I haven't finished the rework of the old research system to make it thematically correct for the 'you owe the company' gameplay. It's not done. [/p][p] I think the TL;DR is that I'm not confident of the quality of the game at this point - I want to be able to be proud of the first release, to point at it and go 'yup, it's great! There will be more to come!' I suspect things are mostly great; I don't think it's broken or bad. It's a million times better than the first FCE release, it's a thousand times better than the first Survival release of FCE, and it's at least 500 times better than Patch 25.[/p][p]Let's not forget, this is how the Survival of FCE was when we shipped it![/p][p][/p][p]One of the biggest changes I've not even started to look at is the concept of having an 'armoury' of robots; there's a few visuals there for now hidden away in the base (and ARTHER is your faithful starter robot) but ones to increase your storage, return items, provide defence, provide solar energy, provide battery storage (etc) - really powerful, but you need to pick what you need for your current task and it's one-per-player when playing multiplayer (So only one ARTHER, SOL-A, SARAH, etc etc.) Which is gonna be awesome.[/p][p]So yeah - it’s still coming along nicely (and to be perfectly honest, progress has been superb recently!), it’s still coming out. I promise I'm not about to pull a Duke Nukem Forever. The extra time should let me a lot more confident, because Early Access is still an unforgiving nightmare, and I need to do a kick-ass trailer still.[/p][p]But here’s what I want it to look like all the time.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]

And here’s what it looks like sometimes[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Made the right choice? Completely disagree? As ever, you can get ahold of me on twitter, BlueSky, Facebook, or, ideally. Discord:[/p][p][/p][p]https://discord.gg/wB2UWXa[/p][p][/p][p]Thanks once again to all the Patreons. You’re the only reason we are where we are![/p]