Challenge Stage Teaser Trailer, Canadian Permanent Residence, and More!

Let’s get to the important bit right away. In Retrospect is nearly complete! So I put together a little teaser trailer showing off some of the 40+ challenge stages that will be in the final game. In addition to the story mode, In Retrospect has a challenge mode with a full leaderboard system which includes rankings for each challenge stage plus an overall ranking for your combined score. So yes, there will be a definitive, quantitative way to prove who is the best In Retrospect player EVAR.

With that said, onto the next piece of news. I am now a Canadian permanent resident! Great news, right? For me, yes! However, I have been very busy lately: getting my SIN number, getting into the healthcare system, getting certified as a teacher, getting my car imported (this has so many steps!), etc. and there are still a ton of things to do. So yes, this unfortunately means that, despite being oh so close to finishing In Retrospect, I have had other priorities over the past few months and I will continue to have other priorities for the next few months. But do not fear, I haven’t stopped working on In Retrospect! I don’t think this will push things back too far, as I said the game is very close to finished and I am still actively working on it. But I also realized that I really want to think about how I am going to launch the game as well, and take the time to do it right instead of just dumping it out there. I was really aiming for a release at the end of May and that’s just not going to happen now. And instead of continually throwing out new dates that I end up missing, I will just leave it at this: In Retrospect is coming soon.

“What do you call soon?”

“I call all times soon.”

No but for real. Soon. You’ll be the first to know.

With that said, if you’re wondering what is left for me to do, at least on the development side of things, there really isn’t much. At the moment the game is more or less complete. I’ve been spending the last few weeks just playing through everything over and over, making lists of things that feel off, then fixing them. Often this is literally just tiny stuff like “this jump feels off, maybe move the enemy one tile over?” and such. Just polishing it all up really nice. I also have a few small little asset changes that I want to make, replace a few sound effects here and there, things like that. I have some bugs to look into as well, but honestly, the game is (surprisingly?) in a very stable state, I have found very few new bugs in my repeated recent playthroughs. Most of the bugs still on my bug list at this point are things I ran into once years ago that I’ve never run into again. I still want to try to address them of course, but overall, the game feels very stable to me. But I may have blindspots, so I’m going to keep going over everything and have a few other people try it all out for me as well.

But otherwise, that’s about it. Get that stuff done, execute a launch plan, and then you can all finally play this game I have been working on for way too long!