Expeditions: Conquistador - Update #20, About the Delay

More information about the delay in the release of Expeditions: Conquistador is given on their Kickstarter page.

 

You may have been wondering what the hell is up. Our website has been down for ages, we’ve been a bit tight-lipped about the reasons for the delay, you’ve started wondering if we sold the game to a social gaming company and moved into a monolithic office building filled wall-to-wall with cubicles.

Let me assure you that this is not the case, and that other than the continued delay, there is only good news.

A week or so ago we let slip on our forums that we’ve signed a deal with bitComposer to bring the game to market. This deal has changed precisely zero things about the game. We didn’t want a publisher to interfere with our product (hence our use of Kickstarter to fund a considerable part of it) and bitComposer didn’t want to interfere with our product, so that all worked out nicely. Just to be absolutely clear, we already had multiplayer done and polished by the time we signed this deal, that was entirely our own decision and bitComposer had nothing to do with it.

bitComposer brings three things to the table: they’ll fund a German localisation if the game sells well enough in English and Spanish, they’ll help us out with marketing, and through them we’ll get access to a greater range of distribution than we could reach on our own, including physical distribution via Amazon as well as in shops. Yeah, apparently some people still buy their games in shops – go figure.

So what’s with the delay? Well as you may have picked up from our embarrassingly uncoordinated attempts to explain it, there is more than one reason for that. First, the delay was because we were talking to bitComposer. Then the delay was because we were waiting to work things out with some major distributors, and though we’re still waiting on that, we expect to be able to release the game this month.

Throughout the delay, we’ve been fixing the new bugs in the Mexico campaign and polishing everything off. Other than bug fixes, the polish mostly took the shape of extra animations (new animations for the horse, turn animations in combat, a cheering audience for the tournament, and so on), a whole lot of interface tweaks (better Info screen layout, some flashes to call attention to resource changes during dialogue or probability changes in the Camp Management screen), a few more sound effects (mainly different GUI sounds so you don’t get sick and tired of that one sharp click we had before), and we even managed to fit in a little more environment art while we were at it.

As for the website, that’s actually completely unrelated to any of this, believe it or not. A friend offered to make us a new website for the game, and he did a very good job on it, but he also accidentally nuked our old WordPress database while he was at it. The new website is done, but it needs a few tweaks to reflect the state of the game. We’ll try to put the finishing touches on the site ourselves and then get logicartists.com redirected until we get around to making a new website for the company.

Thank you for your patience, and please accept our profound apologies for the delay and the vagueness. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments, and we’ll answer everything that we actually know the answer for, scout’s honour.