Day 175: Today is the final day. This project is finally over. Almost one year of my life, all packed up, and ready to download. It feels good. I’m going to the restaurant to celebrate that tonight. I thought doing the release communication wouldn’t take long since, I’m doing it so wrongly. But it did took quite some time. At least it didn’t took more than a day.

Tasks done:

• Packaged the build into correct zip folders.

• Wrote an release email. This seems simple but took a lot of time. I spell checked it at least a dozen times. And I had to set up a mail address on my personal domain to ensure it wouldn’t get marked as spam. Then I had to compile a mailing list, I took all the contact I had (the relevant one, that I really know) and added the emails I got while demoing the game in conferences.

• Updated the itch.io page with all the new assets (logo, trailer, screenshots etc.). That also took a while.

• Made a post on the facebook page of Rogue Cadet. I also updated it with the same new assets.

• Made a reddit post to thank the gamedev subreddit because it has been a great help during development. I also liked to this very log file, so you might come from there.

• Send a build to the artists via slack.

• And finally released the game. That was scary, but I knew there was no way I wouldn’t do it. And so here it is onto the wild web.

Project end: So this is it. The last lines of text. I wrote 171 pages of devlog. When I started I didn’t think I would keep it up until the end. But I did and I’m proud of that. Maybe one day I’ll read it all. I’m not sure though.

What went right:

• I made a game. I didn’t quit, I saw through it.

• I learned a lot of things

• I got a job

What went wrong:

• For a long time I thought that I would release on Steam, or even get a publisher. But I realized I wasn’t prepared to do that. Making money is a complete different set of challenges. And it wasn’t my goal to tackle those.

• There might be a bug in the Mac version

This has been a tremendous ride.