I am new to game releasing. Today I had to accept that. As announced, SONAR should be launched on Desura and some other platforms on October 31st. Today I recognized that the release on Desura has to be approved by the admins. Yes, I am THAT stupid. I don't know how long this takes, maybe a few days so I have to admit that the release on Desura will probably be delayed.
This would be tragic if not many other things happened during the last days. First of all:
SONAR was submitted to the IGF main competition. There are 568 entrants this year and the competition will be very, very hard because there are so many great games participating I am anxious to get to know not only whether my small title has any chance to be nominated for something but also to see which titles will. The most happy I was about hearing a sign of life from Introversion Software. Those guys were pretty quiet the last year, working on their new game Subversion. Now they are back with totally different game called Prison Architect. I can't wait to see that one!
So, do I want to win something at the IGF? Of course. But let's be honest: As I said, competition is hard and mostly I did this just for fun. That's how SONAR started. We finished doing a HRI-study at work, I had some free time and coded a small game. It would be as great as funny if there would be any aknowledgement by the IGF jury for that.
The second thing to tell is that SONAR is now released on IndieCity Underground. I don't really get IndieCity. At the moment, SONAR is in the Community Approval Process (CAP) and I don't quite get how this works. But you can download it in the Underground section, nevertheless. (EDIT: thanks to Er00 for clarification in the comment section!)
And with having done that, I guess I kept my promise of releasing SONAR until October 31st :)
There will be more about SONAR, soon. I got in touch with several other online distributors one of which is in Japan, and there should be the first review published on The Indie Shelter in the near future. Until then, enjoy the demo of SONAR or your full version purchased on Indievania or IndieCity.
-JS
Hey Jim, saw this post and thought I would clarify a few things about IndieCity. :)
Firstly, only you (and CAP testers) will be able to download and play your game while it is in Underground although we will be allowing gamers onto Underground shortly after launching the main site.
Secondly, at the moment only developers can sign up for IndieCity as we haven't officially launched for gamers yet, so if anyone tries to download your game via your link they will be faced with a "login" screen and be unable to register for a login. We will be launching soon, but the current hold-up is the payment system which is out of our control so we're unable to specify exactly when that will be. :(
Hey! Thanks for the clarification! And sorry if this was some negative advertisement or something like that. I thought IndieCity launched already... again: I am sorry for the inconvinience. I think IndieCity is a great platform, for all I saw of it :) That's why I uploaded my game there ;)
Hehe, don't worry about it, just wanted to let you know what was going on with it, that's all! :D