With the project coming to its close, I can now announce the release dates for the game.
Thursday April 23rd will be the release of the trial / public beta [see the previous entry if you don't know what that involves]
Thursday April 30th will be the release of the full retail version of the game
As usual, we will not be announcing a specific time of day for the release in order to try and ease the burden on the servers. Please note that the release is being handled by Grey Dog Software, who are based in Arizona, so it will all be done in regard to American time zones; therefore just because you may see me online and posting that does not mean the game is imminent, as I'm in the UK and don't have anything to do with the actual release.
With so many people being in lockdown, obviously there's likely to be a lot more traffic than usual on the two release days - as a request, please try and help us (and the other players) make these days go smoothly by being sensible with your behaviour. While we appreciate the enthusiasm of the people who turn up the day before and sit around hitting refresh, this really just slows things down and makes the release more difficult for everyone. We will be setting up a Discord server for people to chat during the pre-release wait so as to ease the traffic on the forums, we'd appreciate it if you made good use of this where possible.
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In terms of the current status, I've got a few more days of work to finalise the database, but then we'll be moving into the final testing stage. This is where we play it "for real", as if we were regular players, albeit intentionally trying to use as many of the different features as possible so that they all get a thorough final going over.
I've given us two and a half weeks to do that before the trial comes out so that we'll have time to try out a number of different companies in a number of different databases; this should help ensure that we try out as many different combinations, scenarios, and situations as possible.
Finally, some people have asked about pre-orders; to clarify, that's not something we have the option of offering, sorry.