Before I begin, I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone that Idlescape is completely volunteer run, from admins to chat mods. Nobody on the Idlescape staff team takes any salary and all our money goes back into paying for the servers and other upkeep costs to keep the game running.
Here's the basic breakdown of what's going on currently: The Steam client has issues that are cropping up now that we're further along in the Steam integration, with the chief (and only real remaining big one) problem being the Steam Wallet integration. Our backend system for handling payments was designed solely for our current payment provider and there are foundational changes that are still underway to make sure our payment systems can handle both the existing payment handling as well as Steam or other potential storefronts.
We cannot launch on Steam with only our existing non-Steam payments active as it would violate their terms, and we cannot remove those payment methods because platinum purchases and IS+ subs directly pay for our upkeep fees. If you have ever donated or purchased anything in Idlescape we cannot thank you enough for contributing to keeping the game running!
We were hoping to launch 1.0 and Steam at the same time this weekend (and not announce until we had a fully reviewed, functional, and approved build playtested), on the 29th, but as of right now we do not yet have a fully approved Steam build. We're exploring options to streamline getting a build approved and integrated, but even if a breakthrough occurs overnight there's still a 2 week review period for Steam to get back to us on it that will inherently cause a delay, assuming no issues on our end (unlikely lol).
Basically, the game itself is playable and works fine on Steam purely gameplay wise, but payment shenanigans and integrations are keeping us from launching it.
As for 1.0- it's been ready for weeks now. As a developer I don't really believe in holding onto functional features for no reason. This means that in a standard game dev environment the last few weeks of updates might be held to make 1.0 more impactful, but I'd rather just let you all have access to the content now. This is in part due to the fact we have no dedicated QA or testers, but also because I as a player want all the new, shiny stuff as soon as possible. This means that 1.0 is basically "just" the introduction of new permanent gamemodes, making existing ones legacy, and starting a true long-term fresh economy again.
Right now we are still aiming for 1.0 to drop with Steam instead of having it launch early. This decision has been made because we want to stuff as much polish and fixes into the game, continue working on early/mid-game balance, and have the time to implement the remaining designed quests before 1.0 launches. Also, I want more people to be able to reach the Pre-Launch level goal for the event tokens and icon!
We're working on solutions to the current Steam roadblock and expect it to be resolved within a couple weeks as early tests have shown a lot of promise in our local builds; however, as shown in the last couple months, the local and browser builds do not translate 1:1 to the Steam client.
I apologize for any undue hype that we can't live up to, but in our defense 1.0 was ready to launch a couple weeks ago! To be clear, we're not blaming Steam here, there's just a lot of delays in the review process that neither party can skip for various reasons.
I'll keep you all updated on what's happening with Steam. For gameplay, we'll be focusing on more polishing and bug fixes as well as new and rebalanced content. For content, I'm planning on going through all the equipment and reevaluating their augmentation bonuses for accuracy to find any that are lacking, as well as looking through abilities and seeing if any have unnecessarily bad scaling. If there are items/abilities in specific you any you have in mind that need a look over, let me know!
