Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Day Seventeen: Preparation

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

A lot of people are currently asking us that kind of questions:
Given Valve's recent announcement about hosting fan created mods on Steam, is the Portal: Prelude team going to request permission to do the same for its planned Oct 10th release?

And of course not. This kind of decision should not be taken too lightly. We would need a lot more than a week to integrate with Steamworks. Plus, if you take a look at this page, they clearly say :
It is appropriate for use in broad release commercial games, but we don't think it and our support infrastructure is ready for Mods or games [...]

They started giving it out for mods in secret, it started only a month ago and these mods aren't even released yet (with Steam support). It's up to Valve to take that kind of decision, and if I were them, I'd wait to see the game, before making any move. Don't you think?

On another subject, preparing an international launch is really not something easy. We must finish, build and clean the game, build a final version, make sure that everything is OK and that nothing is missing. We must also build an executable installer and upload it somewhere. We must make sure that every mirror owner that purposed its services know about this installer soon enough to make a copy, but we also have to make sure that no one of these people will try to release the game before the given date. So it must not be too early nor too late...

For the moment, the release date is still planned for october 10th, but we can't exclude any surprise =) We'll probably send a few demo versions to every important websites and magazines that supported us during this "marketing campaign". But it won't be before the 6th or 7th for sure.

Anyway, to summarize what's left to do:

1. Compile a final version of the game
2. Do the last tests and checks
3. Clean the mod folder
4. Build everything and finish details
5. Build an automatic installer
6. Upload it somewhere safe
7. Send it to a few people, magazines and websites
8. Make it available one day before the release to every mirror owner via a server to server transfert
9. Release everything
10. Take vacations

Let's get back to work!