Hey everyone, on behalf of Luminance I’d just like to be transparent with everyone about what’s been going on with our game Employee of the Month. Our game was disqualified from the Game Jam event. As some people were beginning to theorize anyways, we were unable to fix all of the bugs before the game's release. We were about 12 hours behind the amount of time we would’ve needed, and in a rush just uploaded a build of the game behind an unfinished password screen, which was created to keep the reveal of our project not actually being an SML game a secret.

We then finished the work that needed to be done (which was pretty much entirely bug fixes and merging together our different programmers' individual changes), and we replaced the build on the page for the actual launch.

There was initially a major discrepancy over file sizes, and what appeared to be 50+ new assets added to the game between the two builds. This however, was a random collection of models and textures for a scrapped room (a freezer) that made their way back into the project file during a GitHub merge. These files added nothing to the game, and have since been removed in the latest patch, and when you compare the games initial broken release to the currently released build, while ignoring the file sizes of the opening movies, you’ll find that the size difference is inconsequentially small.

However, the decision to patch the game after release was unfair to everyone else involved in the jam, and discredits the work they put in to meeting the deadline. Although we made this mistake, I’d like to at least offer where we were when it was made. We had been working non-stop on this project for two weeks straight, and we were utterly exhausted. One of our very close friends is currently without housing, and our plan was to give him any of the prize money we could’ve earned, in the hopes he’d be able to improve his situation. In such a vulnerable state, we were willing to do anything to still meet the deadline, which included patching the game after launch. We’ve since spoken with the admins about what has gone down, and although they offered to make no official announcement of what happened, we personally would feel better if everyone was aware of the situation.

So what comes now? For the time being, we're going to continue our progress on Rat Race. We also have some ideas for what we could do to improve/patch Employee of the Month to make it an overall better game, but currently we're unsure if we'll go through with these plans.